Gentle Hiking with the Photographer Professor

Ladona Tornabene

by Sheryl Jensen

Ladona

Tornabene’s New Orleans accent instantly engages the listener and establishes her Southern gentility and charm. A seemingly unlikely transplant to the colder climate of Northern Minnesota, she has nonetheless found a new home in Duluth and at the campus of UMD.

Ladona has a Ph.D. in health education and teaches public health education and promotion courses in the Department of Applied Human Sciences at UMD. It was the UMD job that first brought her here in the fall of 1999 but she asserts that it is the beauty of Lake Superior and the surrounding natural beauty of the area that was the other major draw.

As a lover of the outdoors, hiking, and photography, Ladona and co-authors Melanie Morgan and Lisa Vogelsang have written three books:

Gentle Hikes of Minnesota’s North Shore: The North Shore’s Most Scenic Hikes Under 3 Miles; Gentle Hikes of Upper Michigan: Upper Michigan’s Most Scenic Lake Superior Hikes Under 3 Miles; Gentle Hikes of Northern Wisconsin: Northern Wisconsin’s Most Scenic Lake Superior Hikes Under 3 Miles.

Ladona combines her love of nature, photography, and reveling in the great outdoors. She asserts, “I wouldn’t live where I couldn’t walk.”

Passion for Teaching

“I fell in love with teaching adults, and I enjoy promoting health and healthy lifestyles with others,” says Ladona. She received her undergraduate degree at Louisiana State University; her master’s degree at Oklahoma State; and her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

“One of my great passions in life is to promote all aspects of health including intellectual, physical, spiritual, emotional, social, environmental, and occupational,” she affirms.

Ladona practices what she preaches when she says, “Find a career that you love, challenge your strength, and satisfy your heart.”

Hitting the Trails

Following her own passion for the great outdoors, she admits, “I can lose track of time being outdoors when I am in contact with nature.” Sharing that passion led to the writing of the three Gentle Hikes books.

“When Lisa and I created the books’ concept, we wanted to empower others to ‘know before they go’ and to make being in contact with nature accessible for people of all abilities,” Ladona explains.

In that endeavor, the Gentle Hikes books all give significant information about important details like the degree of difficulty and surfaces of each hike, where there are benches, bathrooms, and scenic overlooks, and in general, the access for hiking with small children, the elderly, and people with physical limitations of any kind.

Tornabene, Morgan, and Vogelsang have hiked every walk they have written about for each of the three books. They do their own detailed and specific measuring and their own gorgeous nature photography.

Photography for Scholarships

As a fine art nature photographer, Ladona has established “The Professor As Photographer Scholarship Fund” to help nontraditional students return to school to study public health education and promotion at UMD and to help current students intern abroad in health.

With a show at Duluth’s Master Framing Gallery, she was able not only to see her own work framed and displayed for the first time, but also to raise scholarship funds. Her work remains on permanent display there.

Revealing the macro world of nature is often her subject. One of her favorites is of a single leaf that she almost stepped on. As she looked down she saw the beautiful pattern of rain drops dappled on the purple, violet, lavender, scarlet-veined back of a leaf, and the photo that she entitled “Diversity” came to life.

In what she calls her “Seasons of the Soul” collection, a panoply of flowers, trees, trails, and of course, Lake Superior, she shares her photographic point of view with others who might not have taken the time to enjoy the breathtaking nature of the large and the small, at all times of the year. D

To view her online gallery, visit d.umn. edu/~ltornabe/photography/index.html

by Melissa Maki