Sean Patrick Hill is a freelance writer, poet, and teacher who has spent many weekends and summers exploring the best of Oregon’s mountains, deserts, and coastlines. Born and raised in upstate New York, Hill moved to Oregon after graduating from the University of Buffalo. He lived in Eugene, Bend, and then Portland, graduating with a master’s in writing from Portland State. For two summers he worked with the Oregon Youth Conservation Corps, leading teenage crews into the Cascade Mountains to do everything from maintaining trails to building bridges to counting frogs. Later, as an AmeriCorps volunteer, he organized tree plantings in local parks, clean-ups of riverside environments, and field trips into the wilderness for high school students.

Hill has written outdoor travel articles for The Oregonian, The Source Weekly, Columbia Gorge Magazine, and Oregon Coast. His poetry appears widely in online and print journals, and his first book of poems, The Imagined Fields, will be published this year.

For 30 years, Tom Stienstra’s full-time job has been to capture and communicate the outdoor experience. This has led him across California—hiking, boating, fishing, camping, biking, and flying— searching for the best of the outdoors and then writing about it.

Tom is the nation’s top-selling author of outdoors guidebooks. He has been inducted into the California Outdoor Hall of Fame and has twice been awarded National Outdoor Writer of the Year, newspaper division, by the Outdoor Writers Association of America. He has also been named California Outdoor Writer of the Year five times, most recently in 2007. Tom is the outdoors columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle; his articles also appear in newspapers around the country. He broadcasts a weekly radio show on KCBS-San Francisco and hosts an outdoor television show on CBS/CW San Francisco.

Tom lives with his wife and sons in Northern California.