This American Land

By Rick Bass

IN WORDS OF RICK BASS:

These roadless areas in the Yaak are public lands: lands owned by you, by me, by these writers, and by all Americans. Lands that, against overwhelming odds, have managed to retain the grace of their initial creation; fourteen last gardens where all the various and intensely interconnected cycles of life are still free to play out at the original pace with which they were first designed by the Creator.

Nothing has ever gone extinct in the Yaak — not since the time of mastadons and mammoths — though many of the populations are down to a single or double digit tally, like a reverse kind of Noah’s Ark. Five or six wolves; only two known breeding female grizzly bears, rare even among the rare; one occasional woodland caribou.

The Yaak is a vital linchpin, the narrowest bottleneck in a chain of wildness that extends north from the Yellowstone country all the way up toward the Yukon. And not one acre of it is protected. Not one acre.

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Rick Bass is a wilderness advocate, activist, and the author of more than thirty books. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Montana Arts Council, and others. His stories, articles, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Narrative, Men’s Journal, Esquire, GQ, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Tin House, Zoetrope, Orion, and numerous other periodicals and book anthologies. He lives in western Montana.