Debra Van Winegarden & Thomas Holt Ward

Maria's Book Shop Author Event & Book Signing

Local authors of " La Plata Mountains: Comprehensive Guide to Peaks and Trails"

Debra has been hiking wild landscapes her entire life. As a child, she camped in Yosemite every summer and climbed Half Dome at age fourteen. Each year she went on eight-day, eighty-mile backpacks in the Sierra Nevada with her family. The discipline of recording field notes led naturally to publishing 80 hiking columns in The Durango Herald. Her desire to document our ever-changing planet is manifest in her blog, Earthline: The American West, established in 2014. Debra wrote the hiking descriptions for this guidebook. Professionally, Debra was an environmental science and patent law librarian (MA, University of California, Berkeley). Following that, she earned a Masters in Counseling Psychology and established a therapeutic practice. 

Thomas has been an amateur photographer since he converted the family’s downstairs half-bath into a darkroom at age twelve. He was also the earliest of adopters in digital photography and wrote his own digital image processing programs before any were commercially available. After discovering hiking and backpacking in college, exploring wilderness became another life-long pursuit. After meeting Debra, his computer skills were instrumental in setting up and maintaining her blog while also accompanying her on their shared adventures. His trusty battle-hardened Jeep has also provided access to the most remote of trailheads. Thomas wrote the introductory chapters and the photo captions for this guidebook. Professionally, Thomas was a computer programmer throughout his life, specializing in real-time device drivers. He holds a BA in Linguistics from Pomona College in Clairemont, CA.

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