About Kate

The 300-word summary of my life to date: My travels started at the age of 11 months, when my ill-advised parents took me and my then six- and nine-year-old brothers on a European tour, grandma also in tow. Despite my usually ill temperament, I only cried about half the time and immensely enjoyed myself the rest of the time.

I grew up very happily in Brookline, Massachusetts, then moved to Irvington, New York when I was 16. Dartmouth College, located in rural New Hampshire, was a nice change of pace. There I studied art history and American literature, among other things. I also toiled as a coxswain for the varsity women's crew, discovered my inner dirtbag in the surrounding mountains, and occasionally pulled weeds at the organic farm.

While my college cohorts dutifully trucked off to law school, med school, and other respectable institutions, I bought a one-way ticket to Italy and went to work on organic farms in Sicily, Calabria, and Le Marche, eventually landing in Rome with an internship at the Associated Press bureau. I covered Italian Beatlemania, chocolate festivals, and other "news" while learning how to look cool riding on the back of a photographer's Vespa. I also gained approximately 25 pounds, which can mostly be attributed to my two-a-day gelato weigh-gain strategy.

After returning home, I road-tripped out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I interned with Outside magazine and fell terribly in love with the Southwest's abundance of sunshine and blue skies. After working as assistant editor then research editor for Outside Traveler, I decided to move to Durango, Colorado and try my hand at freelancing.

I have stayed here happily ever since, writing and traveling to some extremely interesting places in the name of a good story. Along the way, I've had the good fortune to meet monks in Bhutan, dive with 1,000-pound bull sharks in Fiji, learn to shoot blow-guns in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and track endangered rhinos for a conservation project in South Africa. When I'm home in Durango, I get to do all sorts of fun extracurricular things—running in the mountains, climbing, biking, backcountry skiing, yoga practicing, coaxing vegetables to grow in my backyard, and tending to my calico-tabby cat, my boyfriend, and his large white dog.