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About the
Authors
Liz Etnier
Mike Etnier
Back to
Hiking in the Great Smoky
Mountains
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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 no running water or
electricity, 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 daily 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 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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