Rick Bass says he does not consider himself a “typical tree hugger.” The sixty-three-year-old Texas transplant is an avid hunter and started his professional life as an oil and gas geologist. But Bass fell in love with the Rocky Mountains in college, and in 1987, he moved to a “blank spot on the map” — the remote wilderness of the Yaak Valley in Northwestern Montana.

Bass, never quite at home anywhere else, found himself surrounded by a rugged landscape of rocky peaks and coniferous forests, including the Kootenai National Forest. To hear him tell it, there is nowhere quite like the Yaak Valley.

It wouldn’t take long for Bass to realize that the area was under constant threat from road construction and commercial logging, because of the untapped timber in the area. In 1997, Bass and three other social activists cofounded the Yaak Valley Forest Council (YVFC) to protect the natural habitat of the “sensitive, threatened, and endangered species” around him, including grizzly bears and lynxes.