- New York Times bestselling travel book author.
- Winner of 2024 Gold Lowell Thomas Award for best guidebook, 2015 Gold Lowell Thomas Award for best travel book, 2021 Silver National Outdoor Book Award, three Gold Indie “Book of the Year” awards, and more than 20 others.
- Author of 17 books on outdoor skills and travel.
- Author of three books on music: I’m a pianist (classical, church, and pop/rock music). I play cello in the Stockbridge SInfonia and in the pop group Hodgepodge. I also play bass guitar, guitar, and hammered dulcimer, and I teach piano.
- Claim to fame: I was one of the first women to hike the “Triple Crown” (all 8,000 miles of the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide national scenic trails) — and I’ve hiked more than 18,000 miles on 6 continents.
- Superpower: Learning new stuff and sharing it with others via books, how-to articles, public speaking, performing, and teaching.
Click to visit my book page, magazine page, photography page, music website, and bio.
Read the Wikipedia article about my work.
Writing Highlights
Hiking America’s National Parks, published by Rizzoli, won the 2024 Gold Lowell Thomas travel journalism award for best guidebook. Photographer Jonathan Irish provided the images; former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell wrote the introduction.
Curious about what it takes to hike the entire Appalachian Trail? Start here: The Appalachian Trail: A Beginner’s Guide, written for Outside, earned an honorable mention in the 2021 Lowell Thomas Awards for travel journalism.
Walk into the past with me with this Saturday Evening Post cover story about America’s National Historic Trails.
America’s National Historic Trails won a 2021 silver National Outdoor Book Award and the 2021 Gold “Book of the Year” award in history from the Indie/Foreword magazine awards program. The book explores the intersection of American history and the landscape. It earned write-ups in Outside, Frommers, USA Today, Afar, Prior Club, BookPage, and Forbes. People magazine included it in its list of the best coffee table books of 2020. Bart Smith took the photos, and Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan wrote the foreword.
My essay in the Saturday Evening Post on having surgery at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic describes the weird new normal — and the gratitude I felt as everyone I encountered made the best of a world that had changed overnight.
This is an older article, but one of my favorites. National Parks at 100 was the March/April 2016 cover story for the Saturday Evening Post. It won silver in the 2017 Society of American Travel Writers (Eastern Chapter) writing contest.
My book, Great Hiking Trails of the World (Rizzoli, 2017) made it into the New York Times Book Review, USA Today, the AP, and People magazine (as one of the top coffee-table books of 2017) — and won gold in Foreword Magazine‘s 2017 Indie Book Awards in the nature category.
My travel website, BucketTripper.com, features adventures around the world with a focus on adventure, eco-tourism, independent travel, historic sites, and building bridges and understanding between different cultures.
Music Highlights
In 2026 I joined the Stockbridge Sinfonia as a cellist, and to my surprise, was seated in second chair. I also was elected to the Board of Directors. I’m excited about helping this 54-year old orchestra continue its mission of performing classical music for the love and fun of it.
On the pop music front, David Hodge and I continue to perform locally, most recently with our friend Linda Tims, who plays a mean ukulele. Our new group name, Hodgepodge, is a nod to David’s role as lead singer and general ring master; it also reflects our ever-changing variety of instruments, personnel, and musical styles. This year, I played hammered dulcimer and cello; David is on guitar and vocals, and Linda was on several kinds of ukulele plus vocals. We especially enjoyed playing for the Berkshire Bask summer music festival and for the Great Barrington Co-op’s “Music on the Patio” series.
I continue to maintain a rewarding studio of piano students. For my music journalism and teaching info, check out KarenBergerPiano.com
Etc.
You’ll also find some recipes and strategies for weight loss on this site. In 2016 I started a ketogenic diet in order to lose enough weight to go paragliding in Switzerland. (Paragliding involves gravity. Sports that involve gravity generally have a weight limit; I was over it).
Years of alternating between long-distance backpacking (where I was burning off more calories than I could carry for months on end) and writing about backpacking (where I was mostly hiking from desk to fridge) had led to weight gain. In 2016, I finally decided to do something about it and for the next ten years I stuck to a rigid ketogenic diet. I never succumbed to the “eat a pound of bacon, a pound of butter, and a pound of burgers as often as I want” type of keto, but it was heavy on saturated fats.
In 2026, in the interest of cholesterol numbers and after reading a lot of research summaries, I modified my eating plan to a low-carb Mediterranean diet that is still ketogenic, but which leans heavily to fish and vegetables. I’ve cut way back (though not entirely) on dairy and meat, and I’m carefully adding some more carby foods such as beans, legumes, and lentils, because of their fiber. I’m keeping close track of my weight and how my body is responding to this.
During this process, I’ve been asked about my weight loss, which was pretty dramatic. That’s why I started sharing recipes here on my website. First, the recipes are really good and having them here all in one place means I can find them when I want them. And I also share some of my strategies, because people have asked about them. You’ll find links in the sidebar (depending on your device, it’s either to the left of the page, or down at the bottom). I’ll be revising and updating some of that information depending on how this new eating plan unfolds.