The Guidebook : Media Room : Author Bio

JANET CHAPPLE's association with Yellowstone goes back to early childhood days when her parents worked in Old Faithful Inn. She traces her love of Yellowstone Park to memories of waiting for geysers to erupt, visiting with rangers, attending slide shows and sing-alongs in the amphitheater, playing hide-and-seek in the inn, and watching as her father assigned passengers to the big yellow tour buses.

A native of Billings, Montana, Janet became a professional performer and teacher of cello and spent most of her adult life in Rhode Island. She edited and contributed to a seventy-page booklet, It's Up to You! A Handbook for Practicing Music.

Also no stranger to teaching and writing is Janet's husband, Bruno Giletti, Professor Emeritus of Geological Sciences at Brown University. Bruno contributed the geological history chapter to Yellowstone Treasures and wrote many of the geological sidebars that appear throughout the book.

Why would a musician and a geologist want to write a guidebook to Yellowstone? A friend of Janet's suggested they might collaborate to update the long-popular Haynes Guides to Yellowstone. Although the friend soon dropped out of the project, the momentum took hold, and Janet was hooked! Taking extended field trips once or twice a summer, reading, researching, and writing through the other seasons, she took five years to create the book.

Asked whether she really walked all the geyser routes and hiking trails described in the book, Janet answers, "I hiked on all the trails I recommend, some of them several times. I could never be in the park without walking around all of Upper Geyser Basin. Once I started out alone in an October snowstorm, but was soon joined by a bison. In summers, together with many friends and family members, I explored trails that I now recommend and a few others I don't. I recommend those that are not too strenuous—they are ways to get away from crowds and enjoy the Yellowstone that not everyone sees."

Along with promoting Yellowstone Treasures, Janet continues sharing her knowledge and love for the park by writing articles for the book's companion Web site, www.yellowstonetreasures.com, and doing research for her next book from her home in California.