From the time she was eight years old, Carter G. Walker made annual family trips to a Wyoming dude ranch, where she fell in love with purple mountain majesties and all things equine. After she graduated early from Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, with an English literature degree, Carter landed, sight unseen, in Bozeman, Montana, and made the West her home.

In two decades as a Westerner, Carter has stoked the flames of her love affair by balancing her intellectual need to tell stories with her physical yearning to explore wild places. She has worked as a wilderness guide in Montana and Wyoming; as a naturalist guide in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks; as a wildland and structure firefighter and EMT; and as a publisher, editor, and freelance writer. She teaches writing at Montana State University and writes both fiction and creative nonfiction, and travels the backroads and little-known parts of the West as fodder for magazine features and food for her soul.

Carter lives with her two adventuresome daughters, Sissel and Siri-wild things, both of them, and road warriors-in Bozeman, Montana.