Keith E Jones

The tweet version of this biography is that Keith is an ex-hippie vagabond with a passion for living life fully. He tries to live every day as if it were his last. Really! When Ghost Tripping was published Keith was living in the Philippines in a bamboo nipa hut, near the beach on Malapascua Island whose size is 1 mile wide and 3 miles long. He has since left this idyllic tropical paradise behind. From 2006 through 2016 Keith was in the USA only a couple months each year and found himself growing weary of not knowing which drawer or bag his socks were stuffed in. He still travels constantly living mostly in hotels, tents or his home in Thailand. Each winter Keith joins the gray whales at his Baja Jones whale safari camp in Baja California, Mexico. For his next venture into the unknown he bought an old abandoned shrimp processing factory on a bayou in southern Louisiana deep in Cajun country. This could become the base for a bayou swamp adventure camp if plans work out. An avid backpacker and adventure seeker, as a youth he hiked for weeks and months on end in the California Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. These extended backpack trips were equally done solo or with some adventurous friends. By age 16 Keith had hiked 9 of the 10 highest mountain peaks in Southern California. More recently his hikes have included a successful trek into the China Qinling Mountains in search of Wild Giant Pandas. He is one of the few westerners to have seen both red and giant pandas in the wild, a tribute to his good luck as a wildlife adventurer. He recently finished the first 800 kilometers of a 1200 kilometer backpack walk across the broadest portion of Northern Thailand hiking from Khon Kaen Thailand to Mae Sot, Myanmar. In 1994 Keith began taking whale watchers south from the USA to accompany him on his frequent weekend trips to visit the Gray whales. Information about Keith going to Baja to see whales spread by word of mouth. People wanting to go whale watching would get his phone number from some friend and then contact him. Keith would arrange a meeting point and they would then travel south to camp on the shore of Laguna Ojo de Liebre or in bad weather to stay in a motel in Guerrero Negro. In 1998 Baja Jones Adventures started operation. The Gray Whale Advocate email newsletter started that same year. Since then Keith has driven more than 250,000 miles on Baja Highway #1 and it's side roads. As a guide and naturalist he has more than 5,000 hours logged sitting or standing in small pangas on the three whale watching lagoons. He has an unabashed passion to be close to the Gray whales, to observe them and to come to understand all that he can about them. He loves to talk about the whales. His life for 25 years has revolved around the migration. Until 2009 Keith still worked in a second career as a construction manager. During the bank recession he left the USA and managed construction projects in Afghanistan, The Philippines and Thailand, traveling and exploring before, during and after each project. Recently he has been working back in the USA finding himself locked down in Texas most recently.