Explorers Club on the lookout for researchers

It's not easy to get into the Explorers Club.

Robert E. Peary and Matthew Henson had to make it to the North Pole, doing so April 6, 1909. Oceanographer Robert Ballard found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest in 1953, and Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Peru to Polynesia on a raft in 1947.

For most travelers, getting accepted into the Explorers Club is the stuff of fantasy. It was founded in 1904 in New York as something of a gentlemen's club where big-game hunters and adventurers gathered to swap stories, says John Reilly, a mountaineer, historian and 21-year member. Now it has about 3,000 members, most of them field researchers seeking information about the world.

Recent or current expeditions include searching for U.S. military aircraft lost during World War II in the Pacific islands of Palau; crossing the frozen Bering Strait in a specially designed off-road vehicle; testing deep-water submersibles in the Bahamas; and descending the 18,000-foot inner gorge of the Zangbo River in southern Tibet.

"People want to get in because they've climbed Everest or been to the North Pole," says club President Richard Wiese, a naturalist and documentary filmmaker.

"But in this day and age, that doesn't mean anything. We're more interested in someone digging in the La Brea Tar Pits or studying butterflies in (L.A.'s) Griffith Park."

Members, it seems, also must have adventurous palates. Wiese says the instinct to explore can be correlated with one's willingness to eat exotic dishes — that is, saying "Yes, I'll try it" when offered a plate of mealy worms. Eating such exotic food has become a cocktail-hour ritual at the club's annual dinner in March at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Membership has other privileges, including the chance to meet famous people at club functions such as oceanographer Sylvia Earle, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and Brian Jones and Bertrand Piccard, who made the first nonstop balloon flight around the world in 1999.

Members also are given access to club headquarters, which are in a landmark Tudor Revival townhouse on New York's Upper West Side. At the rear of the lobby is the globe the late Heyerdahl used to chart the course of the Kon-Tiki across the Pacific.

The bell from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bear, used by Adm. Richard E. Byrd on his second expedition to Antarctica from 1933 to 1935, rings in all club events, including the vaguely cabalistic tribute ceremonies in which members line the building's staircases, holding candles and whispering the name of the honoree. Then they gather by the fireplace in the library, drink a toast and dash their cognac snifters into the flames.

For nonmembers, the club sponsors lectures and a documentary film series on conservation, exploration and science at the New York headquarters.