The History of GeoEx
A Very Personal Account by Tom Cole

Back in the winter of 1980 I got a call from an old friend who asked me a question he knew very well the answer to. Do you want to go to Tibet? My friend and I had trekked in Nepal and climbed in South America together and we had been naively pestering the Chinese for permission to go to Tibet for years. I knew that the country (forever a country to me; an autonomous region to the Chinese) had recently been opened to the outside world. I'd been longing to visit it since July, 1957, but I wasn't quite ready to take out a second mortgage to pay for a place-bagging tour that plopped down in Lhasa for a couple of days.

"It's a trek to the North Face of Everest," my friend said. I felt one little digit away from winning the lottery. The north side of Everest, haunt of Mallory and Shipton. The Augusta National, as far as I was concerned, of the Mountain World. "Who's behind it?" I asked. "Galen Rowell," he said. Bingo! Galen wasn't as well known then as he became, but for a mountain fan like me this was the equivalent of being told you'd be teeing off with Arnold Palmer in your foursome.

There were fifteen of us, including Galen and his associate, a turbo-charged young woman named Jo Sanders. Fewer than 300 Westerners had been allowed in Tibet when we went, and we were the first American group ever allowed into the Tibetan backcountry. We flew to Lhasa from Chengdu, one of the most astounding flights on earth, in an old Russian Ilyushin prop-jet, trying to forget that the Russians and the Chinese, from General Secretaries to airplane mechanics, hadn't had a civil word in a couple of decades. We roamed Lhasa in a rapture, piled ourselves and all our gear into the splintery bed of an old Chinese truck, strapped on our dust masks, and set out on a series of grueling, character- and friendship-building 12-hour drives up to Everest. (Most of our trekking consisted of clambering out of the truck and dazedly stumbling along the dirt road; nowadays we think we're roughing it when the tape deck on our Toyota Land Cruisers goes on the blink.)

That trip, as glorious a trip as there ever was, changed many lives, as a good adventure should --we used to have an in-house motto: "Your life changed or your money back"- and it was the beginning of Geographic Expeditions, known at birth as InnerAsia. Back then, the great game was scoring permits from the Chinese for visits to previously off-limits places (it hadn't been long, of course, since the whole country had been off-limits). Jo Sanders, it turned out, was a master permit-wheedler. The year before, she'd secured permission for Galen to lead a climbing expedition to Mustagh Ata, a magnificent snow peak in the Pamirs out of Kashgar. It was the first American climbing expedition in China since the War, and a good warm-up for Jo. She soon got permits for a visit to legendary Amnye Machin and to the North Face of Everest.

An obscure organization called the Chinese Mountaineering Association (CMA) had, rather inexplicably, been handed responsibility for adventure travel in China. Since climbing, like everything else in the country, was a state monopoly, the CMA was essentially a group of bureaucrats with boots on, guys who had labored in the mass assaults the Chinese had made on Everest in the '60s and who were as familiar with Western travelers and Western ways as the Republican National Committee is with Little Richard's personal life. But they were pretty decent fellows once you got to know them--as I would over the years, to my surprise--and they loved Jo, who could match them drink for drink, ornate toast for ornate toast at the marathon banquets they held for us.

So there we were, camped near the ruins of the fabled Rongbuk Monastery in the very bosom of Everest at about 16,500 feet. Galen had gone off to make a lightening climb to the North Col (he wrote about that, and our whole Tibet adventure, in his now classic Mountains of the Middle Kingdom). Among the many subtexts of our trip was Jo's indecision about what to do with her life. She was at a crossroads. Crunched into a North Face tent that night, after a CMA-prepared dinner--lukewarm pear soup, I think it was-- a bunch of us told Jo she should go into the travel business, start a little company, take advantage of her contacts with the Chinese.

I can't remember where the name InnerAsia came from; Jo was the kind of person who would tell a great story about the name coming to her in a dream (she was living proof that great stories happen to people who can tell them). But, suddenly, there it was. InnerAsia. Specializing in travel to recently forbidden parts of Tibet and China. Dramatically undercapitalized, not terribly interested in business plans (or business, for that matter), Jo managed to patch together a few trips to Tibet and get InnerAsia up and walking.

There was a certain I Love Lucy quality to the whole enterprise, as Al Read will remember. Al, a pioneer in the adventure travel business, was an old friend of Jo and Galen's who was operating his own trips into China and Tibet from his base in Nepal. He was a font of good advice for Jo. A delegation from the CMA came to California, and Jo decided to turn the tables and throw a banquet for them. We borrowed the apartment of a Pacific Heights friend, and the Mao-suited CMAers showed up about six. Jo had decided to lavish them with Chinese take-out from Yet Wah, which was to haute Chinese cuisine what Coogan's Bluff is to the Himalaya.

But Jo wanted the Chinese to think we were cooking for them. So while Al and I made increasingly excruciating small talk with these guys, Jo went into the kitchen, closed the door, and snuck out the back to pick up the masses of white boxes waiting at Yet Wah. On and on Al and I and the CMA fellows droned, stranded on a river of cocktails and friendship of the peoples. Every once in awhile I'd look into the kitchen, which was empty, of course, and report back that everything was fine. At about 11:30 Jo finally showed up. Her car had broken down, adventure had followed adventure--I remember something about maxed-out credit cards and kindly cab drivers about to become hotshot Himalayan trekking leaders--and the Chinese finally got their soggy banquet just after midnight. They complimented Jo on the great...care she put into her cooking.

Chapter One in GeoEx's history has two endings, one sad and one happy. After a couple of years a white knight showed up in Jo's life. George Doubleday had solid travel industry experience, some much-needed capital, and a vision of what adventure travel would become. The unhappy ending of our beginning is that shortly after selling InnerAsia to George and his co-investor Al, Jo was brutally sidelined by a cerebral aneurysm, and had to leave the business she loved. She has largely recovered and gone on to new adventures and those of us who remember those early days recall her buccaneering passion with something approaching awe.

As for Chapter Two: George, with Al by his side, patiently kept alive the little company Jo had conjured up, made strategically magnificent hires (among them Shana Chrystie, Brent Olson, and Scott Montgomery, all still with us) and amiably got us to where we are today. I led trips for the company from the beginning, and went on staff as writer and gadabout in the late 80s, about the same time George, on Al's astute recommendation, brought in Jim Sano, another hire that turned out well.

Actually, turned out well is a thundering understatement (something I've rarely been accused of relying on). Under Jim's leadership GeoEx has become a spectacular success. Here we are in our new quarters in San Francisco's beautiful Presidio, more than 30 of us, hard at work running trips to all seven continents, consistently voted one of the world's Top Ten Operators by the astute readers of Travel & Leisure, named one of Conde Nast's Top Travel Pros, our offerings regularly among Outside's Best Trips, still convinced the world is brimming with new travel gems, still in love with travel and convinced of its worth, and it strikes me as amazing, lovely, and a long, long way from that little tent in Tibet.

As an old timer, I think I can say that even more remarkable than Jo's little company turning out to be a leader in the field (and a very solid business), is that GeoEx has always been a familial group, a happy and dedicated group, and it has been George who has set that tone. From our management team to our newest, bright-eyed staffer, GeoEx is a wonderful place to work at bringing wonderful experiences to our travelers.