Kathryn Wilder’s personal story of grief, motherhood, and return to the desert entwines with the story of mustangs as she makes a home on the Colorado Plateau on property bordering a BLM mustang management area. Following the loss of three key people in her life—her father, stepfather, and best friend from childhood—Wilder searches for grounding amid the grief, even as she grapples with a former heroin addiction and custody battles over her two sons. Living in Hawai’i, she reunites with her deep-rooted love for the ocean and builds a relationship with a local activist. However, it is the Colorado Plateau, with its sagebrush-scented plains, deep canyons, and mountain rivers, that she knows as “country big enough to hold sorrow.”

Wilder moves to southwest Colorado, where she finds connection, friendship, and a new sense of purpose among people who, like her, are powerfully drawn to the wild mustangs who share their desert home. Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West illuminates these controversial creatures—their plight, what they mean to us, and what can be done to help both habitat and horses stay healthy and wild—and celebrates the animal nature in us all.

Praise for Desert Chrome:

“For too long, the lone cowboy myth has corralled the American West in the barbed wires of dominion and destruction. Tangled in that telling are women and mustangs—their wildness, togetherness, and vulnerability. In Desert Chrome, Wilder bucks against a story as desiccated as the deserts she has dwelled in—kicking hard enough to free what was bound, to redeem what was broken. Listen now, to the thundering of hearts and hooves. They’re coming for us, at last.” —AMY IRVINE, author of Air Mail and Desert Cabal