# Tom Stienstra

Tom Stienstra (born 1954) is an American author, outdoorsman and Outdoors Writer Emeritus for the San Francisco Chronicle. He produces a radio feature for KCBS in San Francisco, and hosted and co-produced a television special for PBS on the Tuolumne River. He has written several guide books for California, the Pacific Northwest and America. He has won several awards from the Outdoor Writers Association of America.
A severe brain injury as a young man shaped his view of the world towards appreciation of the wilderness, and in his older years, he has dealt with brain cancer.

## Early life

Stienstra grew up in Palo Alto, California, where he graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1972.
Stienstra survived a hatchet attack when he was 21, which gave him interest in post-traumatic stress disorder and aspects of being in the outdoors. According to Stienstra, he was working a job at a gas station on the San Francisco Peninsula to pay his college expenses when a convicted felon split the back of his head open with a hatchet while trying to commit a robbery. Treatment at Stanford Medical Center restored him to health but the brain injury left him with the persistent perception that he belonged in the wilderness of the 1830s instead of in the modern era. He adopted a dog he named Rebel and spent 17 years frequently hiking into wilderness areas of California, visiting remote lakes together as he began his career as an outdoor writer. After Rebel's death, he adopted several more dogs as hiking companions.
He received his degree in journalism in 1976 from San Jose State University.

## Career

Stienstra published his first story at age 8, "Searching for a Lost Friend", in the Palo Alto Times, which hired him as sports reporter after his graduation. In 1979, when the Palo Alto Times merged with the Redwood City Tribune to become the Peninsula Times Tribune, Stienstra was promoted to sports columnist. In 1980, he was hired to write about the outdoors for the San Francisco Examiner, which at the time operated jointly with the Chronicle. He is now classified as the "Outdoor Writer Emeritus" for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Since 2000, Stienstra has produced and broadcast a radio feature for KCBS in San Francisco, and appears frequently as a live guest expert; that appearance is presently on hold as he recovers from cancer. He hosted the TV show The Great Outdoors for CBS-CW networks and in 2017 hosted and co-produced with Jim Schlosser a national PBS special, The Mighty T -- The Tuolumne River, from Glacier to Golden Gate.

### Books

Stienstra has written many books, including Moon Pacific Northwest Camping, was listed in the Portland Oregonian as a No. 1 bestseller. His current top sellers include "52 Weekend Adventures," "Moon California Camping," "Moon California Hiking (co-authored)" and "West Coast RV".

### Awards

In October of 2024, Tom Stienstra won first place for best outdoor adventure feature writing in America in the Adventure Category from the Outdoor Writers of America at its annual conference and featured in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. In 2021, the OWAA awarded Stienstra the "Joan Wolf Enduring Excellence Award" for career achievement, the first OWAA member from California to win the award in the organizations history. Stienstra's film on the Tuolumne won the 2017 Northern California Area Emmy Award for Health / Science / Environmental Special.
In 2022, his book, 52 Weekend Adventures, was awarded second place in America as best outdoor book of the year by the Outdoor Writers Association of America (OWAA).
Stienstra is one of the OWAA's most awarded members. In 2015, he became the first six-time winner of its President's Award as "Best of the Best", when he won best story of the year in the Newspaper/Website division. The winning entry was "Paddling with giants", published in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 5, 2014. To become a finalist for the President's Award, that story won first place in the Outdoor Fun and Adventure Category of the Newspaper/Website Contest. In 2017, when he won the President's Award for best outdoors television show for his PBS special on the Tuolumne, he was the only member to win simultaneous first-place awards in newspaper, photography and television. In 2018, he won 1st Place, Outdoor Recreation Photo of the Year for "A world apart on the marsh". He won the association's highest award, the Enduring Excellence Award, in 2021, the first writer from California to do so.
Stienstra was the fourth living member inducted into the California Outdoors Hall of Fame.

## Personal life

In 2015, he married Denese Stienstra, with whom he has two stepsons; they live in Siskiyou County. In August 2021, he was diagnosed with metastasized melanoma and underwent brain surgery.

## Brain cancer

In 2025, doctors at Stanford Medical Center, placed Stienstra in medical tubes for new MRI, PET and CAT scans and found no new or active lesions, that the previous cancer had been cleared from his lungs, liver and many other sites, and were otherwise diminished and not active, and that there were “no obstructive disease at arteries feeding his heart." Stienstra wrote about it in an essay called "Postponing heaven" on January 25, 2025. </ref |url=https://www.facebook.com/tomstienstraoutdoors/}}> Earlier, X-rays, MRIs and PET scans found melanoma cancer throughout most of Stienstra's body. Stanford Professor of Neurosurgery, Dr. Steven Chang, and a team of 15 specialists completed six craniotomies and a blood drain to remove brain tumors and additional fluids, and performed another six CyberKnife stereotactic radiosurgery procedures on additional small tumors. Dr. Sunil Reddy, a cutaneous oncology specialist, then directed and scheduled immunology infusions for Stienstra over the past two years. The SF Chronicle published a 5,000-word plus story about him. That story sited heavy exposure to sun at high altitudes as the most likely source of sun cancer.