The big mountains – Bristol Head, Red Mountain, Copper Ridge, and Baldy – hold me in place, the gramma grass dancing in great undulating swatches, the aspens quaking their comfort, the creek and the coyotes combining for a lullaby, the big sky whether full of stars, sunshine or snowflakes is always watching over me. Houston writes that she had “always taken the greatest comfort in being surrounded by wild things” so “it is no wonder, then,” the ranch “opened my heart like a tin can.”Ī place with so little light pollution the Milky Way is truly milky. The story of her love affair with this place begins. She moves into the old ranch at 9,000’ with her Irish wolfhounds, horses, donkeys, sheep, chickens, and a feral cat. The landowner is a most generous and trusting woman who tells Pam that she’ll sell the place and carry the mortgage for 5% down and a signed copy of her first book Cowboys Are My Weakness. After a childhood fraught with abuse and trauma and a young adulthood of adventure and search, she finds a ranch near Creede, Colorado that captures her, and which she wants to buy but lacks the resources to do so. The writing is so good that while some of Houston’s story is sad and troubling, reading her prose is a great pleasure and her message is heartening.ĭeep Creek is a series of essays, part memoir, and part stories about the land and her relationship to it. Deep Creek is a moving and hopeful book that is just what we need in such a time. As responses to the coronavirus continue, we have time to read and need cause for hope.

Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, by Pam Houstonįeatured image: Bristol Head, near Creede, Colorado, Wikimedia CommonsĪs the book review editor of Rewilding Earth – more accurately the book reviewer for the site over the past couple of years, I’m exercising some discretion here to alert readers to a book a bit outside the usual works reviewed that focus on rewilding.

Deep creek pam houston