Lewis Hinchman was awarded an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University in 1968. After three semesters as a Fulbright scholar in Germany, he went on to do graduate work in the Government Department at Cornell University, from which he received his PhD in 1979. While he has published three academic books and has contributed to multiple other scholarly works, he has previously published Hiking Tropical Australia: Queensland and Northern New South Wales with Grass Tree Press in 1999 and has been hiking the American West and Southwest since 1975. He has lived in Moab, Utah for the past 15 years, frequently traveling to the borderlands to hike. He hopes to put his extensive experience with and knowledge of these hiking areas into print with this guidebook.