Geoff Wilson is a Veterinary surgeon, corporate speaker, motivator, entrepreneur, extreme endurance athlete indeed one of the world’s most accomplished adventurers and expedition leaders who is deeply committed to empowering communities and saving the planet.
Geoff has developed an intense resilience, gathered by a lifetime of pushing his mind and body through the harshest wilderness. This steel-trap mindset has equipped him with the fervour to pursue audacious challenges all over the globe, inspiring men and women along the way to abandon the perils of complacency and discover their greater purpose.
After finishing school, Geoff embarked on his first adventure, cycling from London to Nairobi in 1988 when he was 18 years old. When he returned to Queensland, Geoff trained as a veterinary surgeon and went on to build multiple vet hospitals across Australia. Geoff currently oversea 12 Vet Love outlets throughout South East Queensland.
But it’s his desert crossings – in hot and cold climates – for which Geoff is most famous. He has traversed Antarctica, the Sahara Desert, Greenland and even parts of the Australian outback on his kiteboard, buggy or ski collecting six world records on the way. These include the only wind-assisted crossing of the Sahara Desert (2009), the fastest solo, unsupported crossing of Antarctica (2013–14), the fastest unsupported south-to-north crossing of Greenland (2017), and the first crossing of the Torres Strait by kiteboard (2012).
Geoff’s fascination with human endurance fuels his adventurous streak.
“Resilience is not innate, it’s a learned behaviour,” he says. “You can discipline yourself to be more resilient over time.” Geoff says that on every one of these journeys, he reaches a point where things begin to look impossible. At that point, he must then decide to either keep pushing or turn around and accept defeat.
“There’s always something you don’t expect,” he says. “That’s the whole nature of adventure; it’s a series of mishaps that you’d never predicted.”
In 2019–20, Geoff embarked on the longest solo, unsupported polar journey in human history. Departing from Thor’s Hammer on 9 November, near Russia’s Novolazarevskaya Station in Antarctica, he kite-skied 5316 km via the Lenin bust at the Pole of Inaccessibility, towards the South Pole and back to the coast again. Geoff claimed another world record en route by becoming the first unsupported person to summit Dome Argus, the highest point on the Antarctic Plateau with a surface elevation of 4093m.
In 2022 Geoff received the Australian Geographic Society Lifetime of Adventure Award.
