A poignant look at the thirty-year journey of one of our country's great naturalist writers, Why I Came West explores how Rick Bass fell in love with the mystique of the West (and the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana in particular) as a dramatic landscape, as an idea, and as a way of life. In a series of moving chapters, Bass describes his own transformation into the writer, hunter, and environmental activist that he is today. He profiles how the rugged, wild landscape smoothed out his own rough edges; attempts to define the appeal of the West that so transfixed him as a boy, a place of mountains and outlaws and continual rebirth, just beyond whatever was near it; and he describes his role as a reluctant environmental activist--sometimes at odds with his own neighbors--unable and unwilling to stand idly by and watch this treasured place disappear.--From publisher description.