SKYE & CRAIG
Skye and Craig Copeland are devoted hikers whose writing and photography have empowered hundreds of thousands of people to explore wild lands worldwide.
Their second date was a 20-mile (32-km) dayhike in Arizona. The distance they’ve since hiked together exceeds three times the earth’s circumference.
In 1989, hiking in the Canadian Rockies inspired them to immigrate from the U.S. to Canada. They soon covered so much ground in the Rockies, their co-workers who’d lived there decades were asking Skye and Craig where to go hiking. That was the inspiration for their first, refreshingly unconventional book: Don’t Waste Your Time in the Canadian Rockies, The Opinionated Hiking Guide.
Skye, an ESL teacher, and Craig, an advertising-agency creative director, eventually erased the line between work and joy. They abandoned their careers, started their own publishing company—hikingcamping.com—and began writing uniquely compelling guidebooks. They’re now the authors of twelve titles, including Hiking from Here to WOW: Utah Canyon Country.
Because hiking is their life, not just their
livelihood, they often explore beyond the
purview of their books. They’ve trekked
through much of the world’s vertical
topography, including the Nepalese Himalaya,
Patagonian Andes, and New Zealand Alps.
In Europe, they’ve hiked the Scottish Highlands,
Spain’s Costa Blanca and Els Ports mountains,
the Canary Islands, Madeira, Mallorca’s Serra
de Tramuntana, the Alpes Maritimes, the French,
Swiss, Austrian and Italian Alps, the Spanish and
French Pyrenees, Italy's Dolomiti and Apennini,
and the mountains of Norway. In North America,
they’ve explored the B.C. Coast, Selkirk and
Purcell ranges, Montana’s Beartooth Wilderness,
Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, the Colorado Rockies,
the California Sierra, and Arizona’s Superstition
Wilderness and Grand Canyon.
No place in their experience, however, has resonated with them as profoundly as Utah canyon country. They now live in Boulder, Utah, where they guide in Grand Staircase—Escalante National Monument, which they call The Slickrock Hiking Capital of Planet Earth.
The transition from writing guidebooks to guiding in person was a natural one for Skye and Craig. "Whether writing or guiding," Skye said, "our motivation has always been to share the joy, wonder and exhilaration we find in the world’s premier hiking destinations. We did it with our readers for 30 years. Now we do it with our guests."
