JoAnna Haugen

JoAnna Haugen is a freelance writer living in Las Vegas with a soft spot for adventure. She has snorkelled the Great Barrier Reef, trekked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, white water rafted both the Nile and Colorado Rivers, and crawled through a burial cave in the Cook Islands. She has written for everyone from Travel Weekly to the BBC, and has a regular Las Vegas column in the Orange County Register.

Top travel memory: “My greatest accomplishment is hiking the 210-mile John Muir Trail in California. Making the journey from Yosemite National Park to Mount Whitney, I crested several peaks, accumulated countless mosquito bites, lost several pounds, survived hail storms, encountered a zoo’s worth of wildlife and lived to tell the tale.”