Jared grew up in Cape Town, which is still home, and spent his childhood working his way through every mountain range within reach of it. He holds an MSc in Applied Earth Science from Stellenbosch University, where he specialized in metamorphic petrology and spent two years teaching undergraduates in the field, and he joined Quark in 2026 after several years working as an exploration geologist across sub-Saharan Africa, from the copper belts of the Democratic Republic of Congo to remote camps in Botswana.
Alongside that, he has spent the better part of a decade leading small groups on multi-day hikes and overland expeditions through South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. He is firmly of the view that the best conversations start when somebody picks up a stone and asks what it is.
What draws him to the poles is that almost nobody arrives thinking about the ice, or about the ground underneath it. Guests come for the wildlife and the history, quite rightly. But these are also places built by continents pulling apart and colliding, and shaped by ice that has been moving for longer than anything else on the planet. There is a particular pleasure in watching that land for someone who has never given it a moment’s thought.
Jared loves watching polar guests look at a landscape twice.
