Wherever you’ve hiked, climbed or driven in Colorado, it’s likely Stewart Green has been your guide. Green, who published more than 70 books, mostly on exploring Colorado’s vast outdoors, died in June at age 71 leaving a rich legacy of information and photos for current and future generations.

Want to know a great hike to a waterfall or around a lake? Ask Stewart.

Stewart Green, 1953-2024

Want to know where to drive to see the best fall colors this year? Ask Stewart. Want to know what it’s really like to climb Pikes Peak? You get the idea.

He’s the author of such books as Scenic Driving Colorado: Exploring the State’s Most Spectacular Back Roads, Hiking Colorado’s Hidden Gems, featuring 40 unique trails, and Rock Climbing Colorado with 1,800 suggestions (yes, really) of places to climb.

Green climbed them all.

“He didn’t rely on other people’s research. He visited all the places he wrote about, climbing the crags, hiking the trails, taking the photographs and tracking the routes by GPS to create maps,” said Susan Joy Paul, a close friend who co-authored four books with Green. “He wanted his readers not only to read his books but also to experience the drives, hikes and climbs safely and without getting lost.”

That alone set his works apart from many guidebooks.

A native of Colorado Springs, Green lived in North Cheyenne Canon as a boy and often visited the waterfall named for the legendary Colorado Springs author, Helen Hunt Jackson. His admiration for Jackson resulted in his writing about her later.

Starting in the 1980s, he was a contract writer and photographer for Falcon Guides and Globe Pequot Press. His work also included forays into other Western states, notably Utah and California, but Colorado was his first love and focus of most of his books.

On his website, he answered the questions of those he met when speaking at various events in a fairly succinct manner. He said:

“I write and photograph because of what is in front of me, to honor everything … in the world that is great, interesting, mysterious, and always changing. To be a writer and photographer is to see newly every day, as if for the first time, the essence that illuminates and lives within the earth and within me and my experience of the world. Every subject redefines me and allows me to discover harmony, reconcile disparities and inequities, and to find shape, symmetry, and truth in the chaos of life.

​“As a writer and photographer, I seek to record my life and times, my vision of the world and its natural beauty, its other creatures, and my fellow human beings, and to find affirmation in life through belonging, wholeness, and living. I always think of the reader and the viewer over my shoulder, the person who sees my vision and reinterprets it in their own experience.”

And that’s precisely what he did, said Paul.

“Stewart’s extensive, nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Colorado history, geography, geology, flora, and fauna added another dimension to his writing, and he built on that knowledge with every journey into the unknown, observing and documenting what he saw, heard, smelled, and felt on his travels and putting it into his books for others to enjoy,” she said.

“He referred to his guidebooks as ‘books of dreams,’ and for many readers, his books allowed their dreams to come true.”