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About the
Authors
Liz Etnier
Mike Etnier
Back to Hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park
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LIZ ETNIER’s BIOGRAPHY
Liz Etnier and her husband, David, graduated
from the University of Minnesota with undergraduate degrees in Fish
and Wildlife Management, and advanced degrees in Zoology. They moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1965, where he began teaching
ichthyology at the University of Tennessee, and she began raising their
family. After their three children started school, Liz began working
part-time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) where she worked for 27
years. During that time, she authored or co-authored over 50 technical
reports, 20 journal articles, and 5 book chapters, and was co-editor of two
books. She accompanies her husband on many of his field trips, and the two of
them work together as consultants doing environmental surveys. Liz and her
family spend idyllic summers at their remote island on the Minnesota-Ontario
border where they live an old fashioned lifestyle with solar-powered electric
lights, but no running water, cell phones, TVs, or computers.
Liz has a
wide variety of interests, including quilting, stained glass, watercolor
painting, gardening, bridge, and volunteer work. She continues to play tennis
and volleyball, to swim regularly at the island, and to lead a very active
life. However, although they have lived within an hour of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for over 40 years, Liz didn’t
begin hiking until 1998, when she was 58 years old. She immediately fell in
love with the mountains, and the exhilaration of hiking many miles in good
company, surrounded by beauty at every step. She soon became obsessed with
hiking all of the trails in the mountains, and set a goal to complete that
task before her 60th birthday. She found that planning the
logistics of the hikes was often much more difficult than the hikes
themselves, and Liz spent hours poring over the maps to find the easiest and
shortest way to accomplish her goal. This book has resulted from those hours
and hours of planning, and from the subsequent urging by her hiking friends
to write it all down.
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