The Tuolumne Group of the Sierra Club has invited Twain Harte resident and author Kathi Joye, who has published two books about hiking along the Highway 108 corridor, to speak at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept.
25, at the Tuolumne County Library, 480 Greenley Road, Sonora. Joye was born in Virginia, grew up in a military family, and graduated from Coronado High School in San Diego County. She and her family came to Tuolumne County in 2008, and when she couldn’t find a local hiking guide she decided to research and write her own.
“Day Hikes Along the Highway 108 Corridor” was published in 2014, and she followed up a year later with “More Hikes along the Highway 108 Corridor” in 2015. “What I really like about this area is it spans many different elevation levels, and you can get different types of hikes at different times of the year,” Joye said in a phone interview Friday. “And up in the higher country, it has so much similarity with Yosemite, being part of the Sierra Nevada range with the geology there.
There are not nearly as many people, but it’s still just as beautiful.” Hikes she describes in her books are in areas including the Middle Fork Stanislaus River Canyon, the South Fork Stanislaus River Canyon, the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness, the Emigrant Wilderness, the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, the North Fork Tuolumne River Canyon, the Clavey River Canyon, and the Stanislaus National Forest. She and her family came to Tuolumne County from Ohio, where they had lived for three years.
Prior to that, they were working and living in the Davis area. She taught K-12 science at Woodland High School and Willett Elementary School, and she was doing physiology research at the University of California, Davis. Before she came to Tuolumne County, she wrote an exercise book for physiology therapists — “The Basics of Exercise Physiology” — and she published research articles in the Journal of Applied Physiology.
Her books about Highway 108 corridor hiking were her first hiking books. Since it’s been 10 years since her most recent hiking book, does she have any plans for a third edition? “People keep asking me that,” she said Friday. “They’ve even offered me a cabin to stay in to do one about Highway 4.
But I have no plans right now for another one.” The Tuolumne County Library is at 480 Greenley Road, Sonora. There is no admission charge to attend Joye’s talk with the Tuolumne Group of the Sierra Club.
For more information about Joye, her books, and where they are sold, see https://kathijoye.weebly.com .
Contact Guy McCarthy at [email protected] or (209) 770-0405. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @GuyMcCarthy.
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