Kari Nielsen

Kari Nielsen grew up between Montana's Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems, where she spent a feral childhood exploring creeks, fields, forests, mountains and lakes. This geographic foundation sparked her insatiable curiosity about the natural world. She spent several months in Nepal and New Zealand before starting college at Middlebury in Vermont, where she studied environmental literature, geography, religion and nonfiction writing. There, she led student trips throughout the Northeast, and she spent her summers working in and around Glacier National Park, closer to home. When she took a semester off to travel in Patagonia, serendipity brought her to the edge of the Northern Patagonia Ice Field, where she would later work as a trekking guide and ranch caretaker.

After graduating with a degree in English and American Literature, Kari lived in Alaska for a year. She then returned to a seasonal cycle of working as an environmental educator in southeastern Utah and as a backcountry ranger in the Bob Marshall and Absaroka-Beartooth wilderness areas of Montana. During the off-seasons, you'll find Kari and her husband exploring rivers on the Colorado Plateau, mountains on Kodiak Island, beaches in Mexico, and the immediate surroundings of wherever they happen to live. Kari is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction writing while teaching undergraduate composition at the University of Wyoming. Her work, which explores human relationships to the environment, appears in various anthologies and journals. She leads trips for Nat Hab in Glacier National Park, a place she has known and loved for just about her whole life, finding new ways to explore and share it each time she returns.

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