The Adventures' Club

Did you know there is a 105-year-old Adventurers' Club in Los Angeles with its own clubhouse, thousands of artifacts from expeditions around the world, and a group of adventurers who have been meeting almost every Thursday for more than a century to tell stories? Yeah. I didn't know either.

Then the great adventurer Richard Bangs invited me for an evening. Richard has led first descents of 35 rivers around the world, written 20 books, produced award-winning adventure films and is often described as one of the fathers of modern adventure travel. When someone like that tells you there is a place you need to see, you go.

I don't want to exaggerate what happened when I walked through the door, but something genuinely shifted. Adventure has been a defining part of my life for a long time. I've built my life around it, taken hundreds of people on adventures, driven my family through all 48 contiguous states and eventually taken them to 52 countries in 52 weeks. Among my friends, I'm usually the guy organizing the trip, sending the invitation or convincing everyone that whatever ridiculous thing I've found is something we absolutely need to do. There are times when that can make you feel a little like you're one of one.

Then I walked into the Adventurers' Club and realized something. These are my people.

The Bat Cave for Adventurers

The Adventurers' Club of Los Angeles was founded in 1921 and incorporated the following year. Since then, the club has met almost every week around a wonderfully simple idea: go off the beaten path, come back and tell everyone what happened.

The clubhouse itself is difficult to describe. Imagine Indiana Jones had a basement. Now imagine Ron Burgundy decorated it. Dark wood. Old chairs. Expedition photographs. Flags. Maps. Animal specimens. Artifacts brought home from remote corners of the planet. The walls aren't decorated to look adventurous. The things hanging there were actually there. A stuffed polar bear. A shrunken head near the tiki bar. A mammoth skull. Poison spears. Jimmy Doolittle's autographed flight helmet. And in the dining room, the wooden kayak John Goddard used in 1951 when he became the first person to navigate the entire 4,258 miles of the Nile River.

The club began issuing expedition flags in 1939. Since then, those flags have traveled to Antarctica, the Amazon, New Guinea, the Matterhorn, the Nile, the Congo, the Grand Canyon and places most people would struggle to find on a map. They come home covered with signatures and eventually end up hanging on the clubhouse walls. This isn't an adventure-themed clubhouse. It's an adventure museum built one member at a time.

The People

Then you learn who has belonged here. Astronaut Gordon Cooper. Aviation pioneer Jimmy Doolittle. Director Cecil B. DeMille. Explorer John Goddard. Filmmaker and deep-sea explorer James Cameron, member number 1,129. More than 1,200 members have passed through the club in its first century, including scientists, pilots, doctors, mountaineers, archaeologists, journalists and astronauts. The club describes what connects them simply: a desire for a life less mundane.

But what affected me most wasn't the famous names. It was everyone else. Every person I met seemed to have a story that stopped me in my tracks. These weren't people who took a nice vacation once a year and posted the highlights. Adventure had become part of how they structured their lives. That was the revelation. I wasn't unique. I had simply never found the clubhouse where my people were.

The club invited me back to give a keynote about our 52 countries in 52 weeks journey. I've given hundreds of speeches to thousands of people. I genuinely don't get nervous very often anymore. I was nervous that night. Standing there talking about my trip around the world, surrounded by more than a century of people who had crossed deserts, descended into oceans, climbed mountains, explored jungles and gone into space, I felt something I hadn't felt before a speech in a long time. Impostor syndrome.

It felt like being invited to play Augusta National. You know you can play golf. You know you've earned your way onto the course. But you're also very aware of where you're standing. I wanted to belong there.

And maybe that's what I liked most about the club. Membership is selective, but there is no single adventure that qualifies you. In 2024, after more than a century as a men's club, it inducted its first five female members. It isn't simply about summiting Everest. It's about the spirit behind wanting to know what's on the other side of the mountain in the first place.

Finding this place helped me understand many things about Reject Average and what I want it to become over the years. There are far more people out there than I realized who don't view travel and adventure as a vacation from their real lives. It is their real life. I love that.

The adventurers' club has a certain classic and authentic 'private club' feel. It genuinely makes you want to learn the secret handshake and door knock that might get you accepted.

You Can Go

Here's the part I really want you to know. You can actually visit. The Adventurers' Club is private, but it holds public Open Nights throughout the year as part of its Thursday evening programming. Doors typically open at 6:00, dinner is at 6:30, the meeting begins at 7:30 and the featured program starts around 8:00. Reservations are required for dinner. The address is 2433 North Broadway in Lincoln Heights. Check adventurersclub.org for the schedule and to confirm open nights before you go.

Go up the stairs. Look at the flags. Wander through the artifacts. Sit down next to somebody and ask where they've been. I can almost guarantee you're going to hear a story that will inspire you.

I've found similar communities among country collectors, Great Loop boaters, mountaineers and people pursuing all kinds of wonderfully specific missions. They've taken something they love and made it part of the architecture of how they live. For years, I thought I was unusual for doing that. Turns out, I just hadn't met enough adventurers. Now I know where to find them, and so do you.