The beginning

It starts
with the land.

A family thread, a stapled flyer, and what came after

Our grandmother was born in Nigeria. Our dad was raised in Kenya. Africa isn't a place we discovered — it's the thread that runs through our whole family, going back further than either of us.

Our parents arrived in East Africa in the 1980s to work in the NGO space — land restoration, community development, the slow and unglamorous work of returning degraded ground to the people and ecosystems that depend on it. We were born into that work, born into Kenya — raised in the Loita Hills, a remote stretch of highland Maasai land where the grass goes amber in the dry season and the neighbors knew each other by their cattle.

In 2000, our family moved to Portugal. In 2006, we moved again — back to the continent that shaped us first. We settled near Arusha in northern Tanzania, close to the Serengeti, close to Kilimanjaro, close to the Maasai communities our parents had worked alongside for decades.

In 2009, with Jesse at Westmont College in California, we printed flyers and stapled them to noticeboards around campus. The pitch was simple: come to Tanzania this summer — we'll show you something real. A handful of people said yes. They camped in dry riverbeds, walked for miles in the heat, and came home changed in the way that only happens when a place asks something of you. Those first trips were rough and improvised, and honestly, that was part of the magic: we fell in love with watching other people fall in love with traveling in Africa. We've grown up a lot since the stapled-flyer days — we still crave the dusty, open-ended adventure — but we've also learned how good it feels to end a long day in the bush with a real lodge, a hot shower, and a bed that isn't a patch of sand. Old Mountain was already underway; it just didn't have a name yet.

The original 2009 safari group with Jesse and Trevor in a dry riverbed in northern Tanzania, three vehicles loaded up and a group of young travelers
Maasai community and landscape in the East African highlands
Dust and dry-season light on the northern Tanzania savanna
Simple bush camp in northern Tanzania
Ngorongoro highlands and crater country
Cape buffalo on the savanna in northern Tanzania

The Early Years

Jesse Borden, co-founder and conservation ecologist, Old Mountain Tours and Explorations

Co-Founder  ·  Conservation Ecologist

Jesse
Borden.

Jesse formalized what he'd been doing instinctively his whole life. He earned a PhD in conservation ecology from the University of Florida — conducting field research across multiple continents, including wildlife and ecology work in Kenya, herpetological fieldwork in Tanzania, and conservation projects in Saudi Arabia. He speaks Maa fluently. He has led student expedition groups in Belize and contributed to protected area planning as part of the global 30x30 initiative, a worldwide effort to protect 30% of the planet's land and ocean by 2030.

He is, in the clearest sense of the phrase, a field ecologist. Not someone who studies landscapes from a distance — someone who has spent a decade reading them directly, in the dark with a headlamp, from the top of a canopy, at the edge of a crossing. He has been doing expeditions in this part of the world since before most guides were trained.

When Jesse leads a trip, guests are not getting a guide with a checklist. They are getting someone whose entire career has been built on understanding the exact ecosystems they are walking through — and who is genuinely excited to share what fifteen years of that work actually looks like.

Jesse conducting herpetological field research at night with a headlamp Field research
Jesse leading a group through mangroves by canoe on a field expedition Leading expeditions
Jesse doing canopy research, ascending a large tropical tree with a helmet and ropes Canopy research

Co-Founder  ·  Expedition Designer

Trevor
Borden.

Where Jesse accumulated credentials and a scientific framework for understanding the landscape, Trevor accumulated something harder to put on a CV: deep operational judgment, a network of guides and community relationships in northern Tanzania built over years of showing up, and a quiet obsession with making complex things work seamlessly on the ground.

He has spent the better part of two decades learning how East Africa actually functions — not as a tourist, not as a researcher, but as someone whose family put down roots there before he was old enough to understand what that meant. He has bikepacked across Europe and Mexico, motorcycled across much of East Africa, and backpacked through the Rift Valley. He knows which operators to trust and why. He knows the camps that hold in the dry season and the routes that close in the wet one.

He's the first one up every morning and the last to stop working. He doesn't need the credit. He just needs the trip to be right.

Trevor Borden sitting by a small campfire at dusk in the African bush
Trevor Borden arriving on a loaded dirt motorcycle after crossing East Africa Crossing East Africa
Trevor Borden with his young son in a safari vehicle in Tanzania, the boy pointing at wildlife At home in Tanzania
Trevor Borden laughing while dragging a loaded bicycle through mud at night on a bikepacking trip Bikepacking in the field

Travel with them

Come see what they
built from all this.

The 2027 group safaris are filling now. Or reach out to start planning a private trip built entirely around you.

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