Katie Crafts

As a kid, Katie wore mom-made, whale-covered jumpers (the uniform of the cool kid, right?!). In high school, she developed a study abroad program so that she could travel to Spain and see what more of the world was like. In college, she spent six weeks on a tall ship, sailing from Massachusetts to the Caribbean using a sextant, and doing plankton tows at all hours of the days and nights. Through these experiences, she started to piece together the planet from a cultural and environmental perspective.

Katie earned a bachelor's degree in Earth sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where a yearning for adventure in higher latitudes implanted itself in her imagination. She blames it on library procrastination, where she stumbled upon a book about the ecological impact of decaying ships. The feature article was about Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, The Endurance, which was beset in the Antarctic sea ice in 1914. And thus, her journey began. Starting in Antarctica, Katie’s love of the polar latitudes led her to Svalbard, Greenland, and Churchill.   

When she isn’t chasing higher latitudes, Katie hikes, skies, and climbs to higher elevations at home in the Cascades.  Her base camp is in Hood River, Oregon, where she lives with her dog, Mollie.