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Kitty grew up on Bainbridge Island just west of Seattle but has lived in Missoula for almost ten years.

Present Title:

Kitty is a field instructor for the Wild Rockies Field Institute (WRFI) where she teaches the Colorado Plateau: Desert Canyons and Cultures in southern Utah and the Wild Rockies: Conservation Across Boundaries courses, among others. In addition to freelance writing and publishing, Kitty also works with Freeflow Institute, where she initially helped as an intern with outreach for their wilderness writing river trips.

Her Passion:

As an undergrad student in sustainable agriculture and education at Western Washington University, Kitty worked as a mountain guide for years, eventually transitioning to environmental education. Once she moved to Missoula, she taught watershed science for several years but has always identified first as a writer. “I’m passionate about writing,” says Kitty. “Story is incredibly powerful. To build connections, to grow community, to help people grow and remember they’re not alone.”

Accomplishments:

Kitty has thru-hiked three long distance trails, two of them solo, almost 5,000 miles including the 2650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. Before hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she was trying to decide whether to go to graduate school for writing or nursing—nursing felt more practical but she’d always wanted to commit more to writing. She finally decided on writing, and soon after, applied to EVST. Her thesis (and soon to be book) is a collection of coming of age stories—healing through walking and time spent outside. Aside from her book, Kitty has freelanced for several magazines including Bitterroot Magazine, NRS Duct Taped Diaries and Camas Magazine. In 2018-2019 Kitty was the co-editor of Camas Magazine.

What others are saying:

“It's been a real joy to work with Kitty and her writing the last three years," says Phil Condon, EVST Professor. "She brought the same persistence and self-awareness to her writing as to her through-hiking, and I'm happy to have walked with her, at least some of the way, as she wrote her 118-page MS environmental writing thesis, Saline: On Walking Through. Her work recounts three major through-hikes on two continents in 10 years of her life, and I'll be watching for the book! Kitty also did a terrific job as co-editor of Camas: The Nature of the West for two beautiful issues, and there too, as faculty advisor, I was fortunate to work with her.

What Kitty says about EVST:

"EVST offered me a huge amount of support and community,” says Kitty. She chose it over the MFA program because she appreciates the faculty’s and student’s backgrounds. “It was great to be able to make my degree into what I wanted—writing and journalism with some natural resource and food systems thrown in. The program doesn’t expect you to be narrowly focused and a one-dimensional person.”