“I just fell instantly in love with it when I saw it, and some part of me that I previously had no access to reared up and said: You could make a home here.” “I don’t think it was exactly a thought-through moment of wisdom and clarity,” she said in an interview. Buying the $400,000 ranch with her $21,000 in book royalties was another adrenaline rush, and Houston was fairly sure she would eventually default on the note and lose the property. Houston says she set down roots almost impulsively after a traumatic childhood followed by years of thrill-seeking – from whitewater rafting and backcountry skiing to guiding big-game hunters deep into the Alaskan wilderness.

Houston, will share her story in Spokane when the Northwest Passages Book Club gathers on March 26. The story of how she learned to take care of the ranch – and how the ranch took care of her – forms the basis of Houston’s new book “Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country.” The book is an elegy to the disappearing wild places on Earth, including her pocket of paradise, where cellphone towers are banned, developers are persona non grata and the pantry is always stocked against the next three-day snowstorm. She seriously considered a 44-acre plot in Winthrop, Washington, before finally settling on a rugged 120-acre Colorado ranch near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, which she bought for 5 percent down plus a signed copy of her book. She drove north from San Francisco, all the way to Bellingham, before heading east across Washington, Idaho and Montana. When Pam Houston was 31, fresh off the success of her first book, “Cowboys are my Weakness,” she drove across the American West, giving readings, living out of her car “and looking for a place to call home.”

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