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Blair and John with the children and staff of Batopilas Orphanage, Chihuahua

JOHN SALIBA Written by Mary Saliba
My brother, John Saliba, filled every second of his 33 years with adventure, love, humor and friendship. He created a fantastic world for himself, and invited us all in.

 

A competitive skier in high school, he never lost his love for the outdoors. In college he began traveling, spending a year in Kenya. He later earned his MBA at Thunderbird, majoring in International Marketing. It was during one particularly tedious temp job, possibly the last time John wore a suit and lace-up shoes, when he designed a business plan that would become World Trek Expeditions. While staring at his cubicle wall and having nothing whatsoever productive to do, he tried to figure out how he could travel and ride his bicycle and be with his friends – for a living. Downhill Mountain Biking was born.

He began leading day trips to his favorite out-of-the-way places in Colorado. His number one motive was to have fun – and that meant everyone had fun. Eventually, he began leading longer trips. He and his friend, Blair Windley, would go on exploring trips to Mexico, Peru, Honduras… they would find strange, undiscovered corners of the world and bring people to them. With John and Blair, people found themselves leaping off sand dunes in Baja, riding kayaks up to gray whales, riding mountain bikes along the rim of Copper Canyon and flying down to the bottom under the blazing blue Mexican skies. He was never lost, he just changed his plans from time to time… for example, on one of his exploration trips, he and Blair drove several hundred miles in the wrong direction – West instead of East. When John discovered this he said “Heck with it, let’s go to California, then!”

When John died, while traveling in Thailand, so many people felt their hearts break right then. For John, every day, every week was an adventure. But to those of us who went on his journeys, that one week spent with him was maybe the best, most exciting week of our lifetime. So many people have said that John taught them how to live – how to make every day count. John was a generous spirit; with his time, and in other ways. He always managed to find room in his over-stuffed van for a box of Frisbees and candy for the orphans of Batopilas, Chihuahua. He had a love of fun and of life and of all the possibilities of the day, and he wanted to bring that to the children of this country he loved so much.