"The Jump-Off Creek" is a full-length portrait of Lydia Sanderson, a pioneer woman who confronts and conquers the demands of homesteading alone in northeast Oregon's Blue Mountains in the 1890s. She carves a self-reliant life out of an unforgiving wilderness, arriving at Jump-Off Creek with two mules, two goats, and only those possessions that the mules can carry. In alternating entries from Lydia's journal and narrative chapters of shifting perspective, Molly Gloss chronicles Lydia's first nine months on her dearly purchased high-mountain homestead and her relationships with the denizens of the hardscrabble mountains. As we learn that women did clear trees and drive cattle, and men did cook and do laundry, all of our stereotypes of the West and the frontier are dispelled.