A Hunger for High Country

 A Hunger for High Country: One Woman's Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country by Susan Marsh is a fine memoir published by Oregon State University Press. Marsh worked for the Forest Service in Bozeman, Montana for many years before moving to Jackson, Wyoming to work and retire. Despite being hundreds of miles apart, these locales are part of the same Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Her story includes gender discrimination, animal encounters, forest fires, major and minor obstacles, and breathtaking beauty. It's a rich narrative, told with love and honesty. One chapter in particular, about "mountain men" who lived in the forest and abducted a woman and murdered one of her friends, is a harrowing read. The larger sense that I got, as I read A Hunger for High Country, is that Marsh is lucky to have lived in some of the most wild country in the contiguous United States, and when she was working there several decades ago, it was even more raw and untamed. Bozeman and Jackson are now some of the bougiest places in the West--but still gorgeous--and this memoir evokes a more unspoiled era.