After 35 years as an award-winning Boulder-based architect, Bob West retired in 2015, and bought a Wyoming ranch to raise Scottish Highland cattle.

His memoir, "Twenty Miles of Fence: Blueprint of a Cowboy," co-written with Janet Fogg, describes the-at times-bumpy transition to life as a rancher along the North Laramie River. Accompanied by his family and trading what he called the "yuppie hav...