He was a hard-edged rancher harboring dark secrets But Baylor McCullough wasn't talking, especially not to Mariah Ellis, the pushy but beautiful detective who considered him the prime suspect in a recent disappearance. A series of shocking murders and attacks revealed, however, that nothing was as it seemed—not even the past—and saddling up with Mariah might be his best chance at uncovering the truth. Still, protecting her while they searched for clues on his ranch was becoming increasingly difficult as the threats escalated. And the thought of Mariah getting caught in the cross fire didn't sit well with the rugged cowboy. Was it possible the beauty he'd rescued during a raging blizzard was the long-sought redemption he'd been hoping for?
Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction "This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”
Director Sam Peckinpah was just starting out when MGM released Ride the High Country in 1962. He was a new kind of director: young, brash, and in a hurry to help the Western "grow up" by treating it with adult themes. Ride the High Country was something new and different, a changing Western to match a changing West. Stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea were old hands at this sort of thing. Ride the High Country gave the two veteran actors one last job to do and a chance to go out with some dignity. Ride the High Country helped the genre mature and adapt to turbulent, changing times. It launched Peckinpah's career by invoking the themes of honor, loyalty, and compromised ideals, the destruction of the West and its heroes, and the difficulty of doing right in an unjust world--themes developed to their pinnacle in Peckinpah's later masterpiece, The Wild Bunch.
In the 1930s, iconic American author Ernest Hemingway spent five summers at a ranch on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. Here he did some of his best writing, and his experiences in the mountains are connected to twelve of his most famous works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway declared that the ranch near the small, wilderness town of Cooke City, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone, was one of his favorite places to write in the world, on par with Paris and Madrid. Yet Hemingway’s time in the Yellowstone High Country has never been thoroughly examined—until now. After years of painstaking research, author Chris Warren takes readers on an astonishing journey into one of the most important periods in the life of one of the world’s most important writers. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Hemingway was at his best—as a man, father, and writer—when he was in the Yellowstone High Country, and in this fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book, Warren examines what Hemingway did here, what he wrote here, and how his experiences and the people he met here shaped his life and work. This is a Hemingway that few readers knew existed, living in a place that few scholars knew was so essential to his writing. Author Chris Warren, a resident of Cooke City, Montana, has spent years researching Hemingway’s connection to the area. In 2018 he presented a paper on Hemingway’s final short story, which was set in Cooke City, to the Hemingway Society in Paris, France. Warren’s research was instrumental in bringing the society’s biennial conference to Cooke City, Montana, and Sheridan, Wyoming, in 2020.
The year environmentalist Sam Bingham spent in Colorado's San Luis Valley showed him that environmental disasters of global consequence are happening in our own backyard. THE LAST RANCH tells of the desperate efforts of one community to stop the encroaching desert. "A rare and beautifully written account of hard lives in hard times, and must reading for those interested in the future of the American West".--KIRKUS REVIEWS.
Popular hunting/fishing personalities Jason Cruise and Jimmy Sites, also pastors, take outdoor enthusiasts deeper into God’s Word with this rugged devotional that draws comparisons between hunting seasons and the spiritual seasons of the soul. Into the High Country includes truth-revealing stories of adventure and space for writing down one’s own thoughts and experiences.
Former high desert rancher Ellen Waterston writes of a wild, essentially roadless, starkly beautiful part of the American West. Following the recently created 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, she embarks on a creative and inquisitive exploration, introducing readers to a “trusting, naïve, earnest, stubbly, grumpy old man of a desert” that is grappling with issues at the forefront of national, if not global, concern: public land use, grazing rights for livestock, protection of sacred Indigenous ground, water rights, and protection of habitat for endangered species. Blending travel writing with memoir and history, Waterston profiles a wide range of people who call the high desert home and offers fresh perspectives on nationally reported regional conflicts such as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. Walking the High Desert invites readers—wherever they may be—to consider their own beliefs, identities, and surroundings through the optic of the high desert of southeastern Oregon.
Horns and Hair of the High Country is a fictionalized presentation of the author’s extensive understanding of elk, grizzly bear, mountain goat, sheep, and the caribou, written from the animal’s point of view. He inserts informative information about nature into each story, and at the end, he shares with the reader some real-life experiences from the human point of view. For Lloyd Antypowich, going into the mountains for three weeks at a time was far more than a hunting trip. It was like going back to school where he could learn the language of the animals of the wild and the untamed country, where he could get in tune with Mother Nature. That is why he preferred to use horses. The quietness in which he traveled allowed him to hear and see animals that he would otherwise have missed. When one enters into the domain of the wild, the first thing one must learn is to read the signs; it is like reading a book. It tells you what the animals have been doing. Learning that gives one a better understanding of the animals. No, they don’t greet you in the morning and ask you if you had your breakfast yet, but they give you a sign, and if you can understand it, you will know what they are telling you. Remember they too have a brain; and everything that they see, smell, or hear puts that body in motion. If you wear aftershave and scented soap, they will smell you long before you will have seen them. In time, one can gain their trust and learn a whole lot more about them, and that to me is a whole lot more rewarding than overpowering them with a high-powered scope.
