...early in life my
fourth grade teacher taught me to
love reading by ascertaining my
interests and offering relevant books.  My passion for explorers, naturalists and  tropical rainforests was born.
 I relished the stories of Jim Bridger, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alexander von Humboldt,
John Lloyd Stephens, Sprague,
Henry Bates,  and others.

I studied Spanish in high school and
in 1965 lived for the summer in Ibague, Colombia.  In college, my degree was
in International Trade and Finance
with a specialization in Latin America.

I first passed through the then tiny
Belize airport in 1982, on a business
trip to Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela.  The airport was ringed
with manned machine-gun bunkers
and helicopter gunships because of a long-running dispute with Guatemala.
(Guatemala claimed Belize)

I vacationed in Belize in 1986
and fell in love with the southern
rainforest. I then made several
trips to the Toledo District.

In 1989, I chartered a plane and
explored all of southern Belize. 
I wanted a solid perspective of
the geography and was looking
for a piece of "high bush"
that was not adjacent to any
banana plantations (to avoid
deadly pollutants they use.)