Craig and Kathy (Skye to her friends) are hikers whose writing and photography have empowered hundreds of thousands of people to explore wild lands worldwide.
Their second date was a 20-mile (32-km) dayhike in Arizona. The distance they’ve since hiked together exceeds twice the earth’s circumference.
In 1989, hiking in the Canadian Rockies inspired them to immigrate from the U.S. to Canada. They soon covered so much ground in the Rockies, their co-workers who’d lived there decades were asking Skye and Craig where to go hiking. That was the inspiration for their first, refreshingly unconventional book: Don’t Waste Your Time in the Canadian Rockies, The Opinionated Hiking Guide.
Skye, an ESL teacher, and Craig, an advertising-agency creative director, eventually erased the line between work and joy. They abandoned their careers, started their own publishing company—hikingcamping.com—and began writing uniquely compelling guidebooks. They’re now the authors of twelve titles, including the bestseller Hiking from Here to WOW: Utah Canyon Country.
Because hiking is their life, not just their livelihood, they often explore beyond the purview of their books. They’ve trekked through much of the world’s vertical topography, including the Nepalese Himalaya, Patagonian Andes, and New Zealand Alps. In Europe, they’ve hiked the Scottish Highlands, Spain’s Costa Blanca and Els Ports mountains, the Canary Islands, Mallorca’s Serra de Tramuntana, the Alpes Maritimes, the French, Swiss, Austrian and Italian Alps, Italy's Dolomiti and Apennini, and the mountains of Norway. In North America, they’ve explored the B.C. Coast, Selkirk and Purcell
ranges, Montana’s Beartooth Wilderness,
Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, the Colorado
Rockies, the California Sierra, and Arizona’s Superstition Wilderness and Grand Canyon.
While their publishing company remains in Alberta, and they'll always think of the Canadian Rockies and B.C.'s West Kootenay as their home ranges, Skye and Craig are nomadic. They guide in the Canary Islands each winter. And every spring and fall they guide in Utah canyon country. The transition from writing guidebooks to guiding in person was a natural one for Skye and Craig. If you've appreciated them as authors, you now have the opportunity to get acquainted with them in person. Visit www.UtahSlickrockGuides.com to learn about their canyon-country guiding, or email them at <nomads@hikingcamping.com> to see if there's room for you on their next Canary Islands journey.