About A. Lynn Ash
A. Lynn Ash is the author of The Route from Cultus Lake: A Woman’s Path to a Solo Camping Lifestyle, a memoir about her early solo camping adventures, including a year-long solo camping trip through America in a 1978 Volkswagen pop-top camper from June 1981 to June 1982.
Ash was born and reared in Eugene, Oregon where she attended the University of Oregon, studying theater for two years before switching to psychology and earning her B.S. in 1971. During her time at the U of O, she was a contributing editor for the Oregana, the university’s quarterly magazine. In 1975 she earned an M.A. in geography at California State University. After an unfruitful search for a full-time college teaching position, she became a city planner, a job she disliked enough to compel her to quit and fulfill her dream of camping around the United States and Canada for a year. This venture initiated a thirty-year solo camping lifestyle. During her brief career as a city planner, the author became a founding member of a new chapter of the Audubon Society. Thus began a life-long love of birding, a prominent theme in her book. In addition to her stint as a city planner, Ash has worked as an elementary school teacher and a professor of geography.
For thirty-five years Ash was an avid long-distance runner. She claims to have been the first female jogger in Eugene, (Track-Town, USA) Oregon in the early 1960s. “I can’t prove it, but I have evidence,” she states. “I had to buy men’s running shoes because women’s running shoes didn’t exist at that time.” Ash is also a lover of music, having sung lead roles in operettas and performed as narrator with a symphony orchestra in the children’s classic Tubby the Tuba. The Route from Cultus Lake is Ash’s first book. She has begun work on her second book, Vagabonda, which describes more of her camping adventures.
In 2010, Ash returned to her beloved hometown of Eugene, Oregon where she currently resides.
Ash was born and reared in Eugene, Oregon where she attended the University of Oregon, studying theater for two years before switching to psychology and earning her B.S. in 1971. During her time at the U of O, she was a contributing editor for the Oregana, the university’s quarterly magazine. In 1975 she earned an M.A. in geography at California State University. After an unfruitful search for a full-time college teaching position, she became a city planner, a job she disliked enough to compel her to quit and fulfill her dream of camping around the United States and Canada for a year. This venture initiated a thirty-year solo camping lifestyle. During her brief career as a city planner, the author became a founding member of a new chapter of the Audubon Society. Thus began a life-long love of birding, a prominent theme in her book. In addition to her stint as a city planner, Ash has worked as an elementary school teacher and a professor of geography.
For thirty-five years Ash was an avid long-distance runner. She claims to have been the first female jogger in Eugene, (Track-Town, USA) Oregon in the early 1960s. “I can’t prove it, but I have evidence,” she states. “I had to buy men’s running shoes because women’s running shoes didn’t exist at that time.” Ash is also a lover of music, having sung lead roles in operettas and performed as narrator with a symphony orchestra in the children’s classic Tubby the Tuba. The Route from Cultus Lake is Ash’s first book. She has begun work on her second book, Vagabonda, which describes more of her camping adventures.
In 2010, Ash returned to her beloved hometown of Eugene, Oregon where she currently resides.
