THERE ARE ACTUALLY THREE MEN known as Richard Wiese. The first is Richard Wiese Sr., a legendary Pan Am pilot. Now 76, Wiese Sr. (who bills himself as "the real Richard Wiese") was the first man to fly solo across the Pacific, in 1959, using a twin-engine turboprop and one of the earliest satellite weather maps.

Junior grew up on Long Island—a child of the Jet Age with access to free worldwide flights on Pan Am. He summited Kilimanjaro at age 11 and hasn't stopped traveling since. Sandy-haired and six-one, Wiese has an all-American, glass-of-milk appearance. He worked as a Ford model (see Mademoiselle, August 1979), weatherman (in Connecticut and then New York), and actor (mostly on soap operas, but he also did a brief smooch scene with Brooke Shields in 1981's Endless Love). Then, in 1988, he broke into national television as a correspondent for a Fox science-and-technology program called Beyond Tomorrow.

Now 46 and single (he has a girlfriend), Wiese has a smooth, camera-ready manner that can lead to the assumption he's an airhead. He's not. He's a Brown graduate, fluent in history, biology, cosmology, and literature. As a correspondent for the UPN affiliate in New York, he won a science Emmy in 1996 for his reporting on germs in public places. (Bottom line: Don't use the cash machine in Grand Central.)

Then there's the third Richard Wiese, whom Wiese himself refers to as "Richard Wiese, TV character." This is the name-dropping doppelganger who sometimes shows too much chest hair in photographs and is known to wear nylon safari shirts covered in pointless Velcro tabs.

It's this Richard Wiese who stars in Exploration with Richard Wiese, which is produced by South Carolina–based Litton Entertainment and began airing last fall. In one episode I watched, Wiese saddles a horse at a Colorado dude ranch while promising "adventure" and an "expedition." When I woke up 20 minutes later, he still wasn't on the horse. In 22 episodes, syndicated nationally—in New York, it's on ABC at the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. on Saturdays—Wiese climbs New Hampshire's Mount Washington (you can drive to the top), wades with crocodiles in Australia, and ice-axes his way up peaks in the Rockies and Alaska. If the budget were any lower, they'd have to shoot the whole thing in Central Park.

Wiese joined the Explorers Club in 1989. Like Walter Cronkite and Lowell Thomas, he qualified partly for his ability to communicate the importance of exploration to others. Elected president on his first try, in 2002, he began upping his expedition cred, making a first ascent in Alaska and joining an archaeological dig in Cyprus. He stood in contrast to his immediate predecessor, Faanya Rose, a steely Englishwoman "of mature age," as she puts it, a powerful advocate for conservation in Africa, and the wife of beloved club patron Robert H. Rose.

The difference in their styles was illustrated one night this spring, when I attended a book party hosted by Outside on the club's second floor. (The club occasionally rents the space out.) Wiese was there, working the room, collecting contacts, and booming out his anecdotes. Rose, meanwhile, had bypassed what she later referred to as "the promotion" and headed to the members-only fifth floor, a half-timbered space with more stuffed animals than a Toys "R" Us (among them a mounted cheetah, the heads of 22 lions and gazelles, an antelope "collected" by Charles Lindbergh, and a black rhino plugged by Teddy Roosevelt). Amid the trophies, she gamely absorbed a lecture on the latest research in Egyptology.

Rose, who comes across like Margaret Thatcher to Wiese's Bill Clinton, declined to discuss Wiese's friction with the board. When I called her for an interview, she diplomatically said that "every president has their own particular strengths" and made what sounded like a backhanded compliment, noting that Wiese excelled at "the razzmatazz." When I asked what she really thought of him, she gave me a black eye over the telephone.

"I won't be drawn," she hissed.