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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 plays tennis and pickleball and continues 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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