The Wind River Variations is a collection of poems and prose-poems given birth by Brian Brett's participation in one of a series of river expeditions in the summer of 2003, introducing artists, environmentalists, writers, photographers, and Native elders to the hard-to-access glories of the three rivers—the Wind River, the Bonnet Plume River, and the Snake River that feed the Peel River which eventually flows into the Mackenzie River and the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean. These three rivers and their spectacular and delicate watersheds are nearly untouched, and are all under threat from a multitude of development proposals.