About Kathryn Kincannon-Irwin

Raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, Kathryn graduated with an honors degree in Psychology from Stanford University in 1979. She did not, however, charge forward into the brave new world of corporate America as her parents intended. Determined to shed her sheltered skin, to find and follow her own path, she instead moved to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and became a ski bum and a waitress. “I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up,” she muses. “But I did know I wanted nothing to do with the rat race of the city, fluorescent lights and stuffy offices. So I rented a cabin in the woods and indulged my passions – skiing, sailing, playing tennis, riding horses, hiking mountains, playing my piano and doing t’ai chi – all with a vengeance. And I loved every minute of it.”

Kathryn’s affinity for resorts led her to a long and lucrative career in the hospitality industry, where she worked in mountain resort environments in the Sierras, the Rockies, the Cascades, the Tetons, the Alps and the Adirondacks, progressively donning the hats of restaurant manager, realtor, travel writer, marketing director and general manager. Drawn to perfectionism, Kathryn found herself best suited to the crème de la crème of hotel associations – Relais & Chateaux. From 1988 – 2003, Kathryn opened and managed two of the United States’ premier small luxury hotels to 4 and 5-star status – Chateau du Sureau near Yosemite National Park, and the Lake Placid Lodge in Lake Placid, New York. It was as managing director/partner at the Lake Placid Lodge that she achieved her hotelier distinction – taking a dilapidated lakefront property from a 38-room, $69/night shared-bath motel to an exclusive 30-room, $800/night, $6.5 million annual grossing resort touted in Zagat Survey as one of the “Top 10 small resorts in the U.S.” Kathryn’s hotel career has been highlighted in both books and publications. She was profiled in Cooking Light Magazine (Second Nature – June 2002), selected as the nation’s featured female hotelier in Ceel Pasternak’s book “Cool Careers for Girls: Travel and Hospitality,” and chosen as one of 18 Adirondack women focused on in Kathleen Bagley’s book “Ladies of the Lake: Women Rooted in Water” (Kathryn Kincannon: Managing the Millionaires).

Albeit rewarding professionally, after fifteen years of ensuring affluent travelers achieved the pinnacle of destination resort happiness, Kathryn was ready for a change. It came in the shape of one 2-legged man and his passion for 4-legged equines. On vacation at a Relais & Chateaux hotel in Colorado, Kathryn met Canada’s Horse Whisperer, Chris Irwin, the upscale resort’s featured headline clinician, and her life changed forever. Horse-crazy since she was a girl, Kathryn was fascinated by the unique dialogue Chris had perfected in speaking equine body language to horses and communicating those skills to people. It opened up a world she had barely dared to imagine. In August of 2002, Kathryn took the plunge, leaving her cushy hotel life behind, embarking upon a journey with Chris and the horses in Canada. They were married in Bermuda in December of 2003 and in 2005 bought their dream property, Riversong Ranch in Alberta.

Since her shift from hotels to horses, Kathryn has completely reinvented herself. She trains and coaches alongside her husband in his Train The Trainer Certification program in Canada, the U.S., Holland, Belgium and Ireland, is a featured equine columnist with her monthly “Ask The Alpha Mare” column, spent a year managing the Maker’s Mark Secretariat Center, a Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation retraining center in Lexington, Kentucky and has evolved a unique niche of women’s workshops, Equiana – The Power of Mare Medicine for Women Coming of Age (www.equiana.com) which she offers in Canada and Europe. Kathryn also designs and makes her own line of jewelry - Panther Designs, personal power jewelry.

“The more I work with horses, the more I bow to their way of showing me that HOW I am is WHO I am. A horse will see right through who you pretend to be, encouraging you to speak your truth and walk your talk - a dose of good medicine indeed.”