Blue Clover Press was founded in 1990 by partners Scott Skinner, Michael Gardner, and Bob Couchman. The goal of the partners is to set new standards in the publication of adventure guide books by the uniqueness of subject matter, format, style, and design.

For example, when Blue Clover published Colorado Gonzo Rides in 1991, no other mountain bike guide book focused exclusively on single track rides--the ultimate mountain bike riding experience—and no guide book covered the entire state. Also, Blue Clover worked with the author, Michael Merrifield, to write the book in an anecdotal style, so that the book was not only informationally detailed and accurate, but fun to read in its own right as well.

Blue Clover's second project was the publication of Lou Dawson's Guide to the Colorado Fourteeners. The production of this work involved a number of design challenges. For one, the amount of information Lou had collected by being the only individual to ski the fourteeners far exceeded the amount of information in existing fourteener guides: no other fourteener guide deals with the fourteeners during snow season. Because of this, we decided to break the book into two volumes, the Northern Peaks and the Southern Peaks. Second, we were unhappy with the quality of topographic maps in other guide books, and decided to make them a stand-out feature in Dawson's Guide. Lou Dawson digitally scanned and manipulated all of the maps--a process that took hours per map -- and they were sent to the printer as digital images and output at a high level of resolution so that they are clear, readable, functional tools and not just photocopied topo maps or hand drawn likenesses of the routes. Finally, the same process was applied to the photos. All other fourteener guide books use photos as an aesthetic addition. In contrast, they are an integral part of Dawson's Guide: each peak has at least one, and often two or more photos, detailing the routes described in the accompanying text.

Dawson's Guide Volume 1 was a finalist and Volume 2 the winner of the guidebook category of the Banff Mountain Guidebook contest.

Blue Clover's third book, Ric Geiman's Guide to the Best Climbs in the Garden of the Gods was published in the summer of 1998.