Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

I can’t decide if Mineral County, Colorado, is a piece of heaven or if it’s actually heaven. Either way, it is a wondrous Rocky Mountain paradise — a paradise beset by bitter cold, fires, and various degrees of hardship, but always exquisite beauty. Pam Houston has 120 acres of it, and readers get a glimpse of life and death on the ranch in this marvelous combination of memoir and nature writing. Both deeply personal and wide-reaching, Deep Creek is about the human capacity to feel grief and joy all at once for the ground beneath one’s feet and the planet as a whole.

Deep Creek is Pam Houston at her most honest and lyrical. She looks at how her life has been shaped by her beautiful ranch in Colorado’s high country, and she lovingly evokes that land with its horses, dogs, and, most importantly, the people who populate and enrich her life.