What's Not to Hike? Creating Loops & Lattes

If you could fold three of your loves into one special career, you would probably do it, right? But what if you didn’t know beforehand that it would turn into a successful career?
What if it could have been a financial and personal disaster? What then? Would you have leapt off that cliff?
Join Nicola Ross as she tells her story of launching her Loops & Lattes Hiking Guides. Describing her adventure in words and photographs, Nicola will bring alive the rich beauty of the hiking available in our backyards that have become her career, vocation and another love.

Nicola Ross
The winner of numerous writing honours, including a National Magazine Award, Nicola is the author a dozen books, including the popular Loops & Lattes Hiking Guides. She is a regular contributor to In the Hills magazine and her articles have been published in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Explore magazine, Mountain Life, Avenue, Ontario Nature, Alternatives Journal, and more.

Nicola’s adventures include crossing Costa Rica from coast to coast, traversing Spain via the Camino de Santiago, exploring Mexico’s Zapateca lands, climbing her way through Austria, Slovenia and Italy along the Alpe Adria Trail, and falling in love with Newfoundland’s East Coast Trail. She has canoed the fabled Mountain and Keele Rivers in the Northwest Territories and kayaked through Haida Gwaii, the Sea of Cortez and across Georgian Bay. Moreover, she’s cycled through Cuba, Europe, Canada and Mexico.

Her latest writing project, 40 Days & 40 Hikes: Loving the Bruce Trail One Loop at a Time, is part memoir, part hiking guide and part engaging storytelling. It describes her journey along Ontario’s 900-kilometre Bruce Trail from Queenston Heights on the Niagara Peninsula to Tobermory on the Bruce.

Born in Belfountain, a hamlet nestled into Caledon’s hills, Nicola now lives 10 kilometres up the road in a stone mill (circa 1857) in Alton with her partner Alex. For more information about Nicola, visit her website at www.loopsandlattes.ca and/or her blog at www.nicolaross.ca.