By Everett Potter

There are a handful of adventure travel companies that really define the genre. Wilderness Travel is among them.  The 40 year old company creates extraordinary itineraries, has legions of repeat travelers and has a knack for discovering or rediscovering lost corners of the earth. I recently had chance a chance to speak with Barbara Banks,  a 20 year veteran of the company and now their director of marketing and new trip development.

I think of Wilderness Travel is one of the original adventure travel companies, along with Mountain Travel Sobek and Butterfield & Robinson. Can you tell us about its origins?

Wilderness Travel was started with the dream of a climber and photographer, Bill Abbott, who was raised in South America. His vision, in 1978, was to share the incredible places that he had come to know in his years of tramping about the continent. And with a hastily leased office space, and the first desk consisting of a closet door set on two sawhorses, ‘South America Wilderness Travel’ was born … continue reading