Rick Bass Books in Order

Seventeen essays explore the Texas Hill Country hunting ground Rick Bass's family has visited for generations. Campfire stories, wildlife, and seasonal rituals reveal how a shared landscape sustains family relationships and offers renewal beyond the hunt itself.

Rick Bass reflects on his relationship with American wilderness through essays about journeys into wild places. His encounters away from everyday work explore the appeal of nature and the personal meaning found in remaining open to it.

Rick Bass records winter in a remote Montana valley, observing a landscape shaped by cold and isolation. This account considers the experience of inhabiting a place apart from ordinary conveniences and finding value in the season's demands.

Three novellas connect landscape, longing, and unexpected human bonds. A former football player revisits an old friendship, an evangelist devotes himself to a garden, and two brothers discover an unusual athlete whose arrival transforms their family.

Rick Bass joins a search for evidence that grizzly bears survive in southern Colorado's mountains despite their presumed disappearance. The expedition combines tracking with reflections on wilderness, human encroachment, and what the bears' continued existence would mean.

A narrator in Montana's Yaak Valley struggles to reconcile writing with the urgent work of defending a threatened landscape. Moving between geological work, art, and activism, he confronts the emotional cost of hope amid environmental destruction.

Rick Bass examines efforts to return Mexican wolves to the American Southwest. Considering the perspectives of people divided over reintroduction, he explores how protecting a predator tests human relationships with wildlife and the landscapes they share.

An oil prospector and his daughter struggle over the loyalties of two geologists working in a Montana valley. As one young man investigates his mentor's past, love and ambition become entangled with the future of the landscape.

Rick Bass reflects on years spent with his dog Colter, whose instincts draw him through the mountain valleys of the Yaak. Encounters with fellow writers connect this companionship to questions about intuition, creative work, and making art.

Rick Bass adopts Colter, a German shorthair puppy nobody else wants, and discovers an unexpectedly gifted companion. Their time together in the Montana hills becomes a meditation on loyalty, attention, and the ways a dog can deepen human experience.

These stories explore relationships shaped by the natural world, from an uncanny journey beneath a frozen lake to a couple lost in an abandoned mine. Other encounters connect grief, memory, and desire with landscapes that resist easy understanding.

This collection of twenty-seven essays presents the Yaak Valley through the experiences of residents and visitors. Their observations of wildlife, isolation, and daily life make a case for preserving the remaining roadless country in northwestern Montana.

A wolf pack's attempt to settle outside Montana's protected national parks exposes conflicting ideas about the West. Rick Bass follows its fate while examining the relationships among predators, ranchers, wildlife managers, and people advocating wilderness protection.

Bass visits Alaska’s Gwich’in community during its annual caribou hunt as proposed oil drilling threatens the herd’s calving grounds. He examines the connections between the animals, Indigenous culture, and the struggle to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Two young Texans join an expedition to the Mexican border and are captured during a raid on Mier. Their imprisonment places them inside a larger political struggle, turning an adventure into a test of survival shaped by Texas history.

Rick Bass traces his journey from Houston and petroleum geology to a home in Montana's remote Yaak Valley. His search for belonging becomes intertwined with writing and the difficult responsibility of defending the wilderness he has come to love.

Longtime friends Robert and Jack travel to Montana for their annual pheasant hunt on land owned by a religious community. Their encounters there bring friendship, illness, and Robert’s troubled marriage into a different and unsettling perspective.

Rick Bass follows a year in Montana's Yaak Valley, recording seasonal changes alongside the practical demands of family life in the wilderness. Wildlife, neighbors, and his daughters' experiences illuminate the rewards and vulnerability of this remote home.

The Brown siblings rise from an Arkansas childhood to country music stardom, then face the erosion of fame and family bonds. Moving between their promising past and later obscurity, this novel examines ambition, memory, and the desire for recognition.

Rick Bass and David James Duncan combine fiction and essay to oppose an industrial transport route serving Alberta's tar sands. Their paired works examine what is at stake for forests, salmon, and communities in the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies.

A teaching position at Beloit College brings Rick Bass's imaginative life into collision with academic expectations. Stories about animals, hunting, and everyday mishaps explore the uneasy fit between human institutions and the natural selves people bring into them.

Rick Bass revisits his family's Texas Hill Country hunting ground through memories spanning generations. Returning to a landscape shared for more than seventy-five years, he considers the traditions, family connections, and lessons carried in its seasonal rituals.

Traveling through Rwanda, Rick Bass encounters the legacy of genocide alongside striking landscapes and a younger generation's artistic vitality. His account moves from Kigali to mountain gorilla preserves, exploring how historical trauma coexists with hope and renewal.

Drawing on journals from his work as a petroleum geologist, Rick Bass explores the search for oil alongside love, family, and approaching adulthood. Geological time and the earth's hidden resources provide a frame for considering the brevity of human life.

Rick Bass travels to Namibia to encounter black rhinos and the people working to protect them. His account explores the aftermath of poaching and civil war, examining a conservation approach that gives communities a stake in keeping the animals alive.

Around a West Texas salt lake, a geologist, a mining couple, and other seekers pursue oil, artifacts, love, and escape. Their stories converge across generations as the desert exposes the consequences of greed and the possibility of starting again.

These essays revisit Texas through family memories, travel, music, and encounters with its land and people. Rick Bass moves between past and present, considering what has disappeared, what endures, and what might still be protected.

New and selected essays move from Montana to Namibia, Alaska, and the Galapagos, exploring ecological and personal landscapes. Rick Bass balances the pressures of environmental activism with close attention to the natural beauty that gives preservation its purpose.

Rick Bass follows the Texas Express, a semiprofessional football team, through three seasons before unexpectedly taking the field himself. The experience exposes the players' injuries, hopes, friendships, and the forces of race, faith, and poverty shaping their lives.

These new and selected stories follow people confronting difficult family ties, romantic attachments, and the demands of fate. Across varied landscapes, their intimate struggles reveal how human longing and vulnerability connect to the natural world around them.