SO HE'S HANDSOME and more or less articulate, travels the world for free, and stars on a TV show with his name on it. Even if he never makes prime time, it is still very good to be Richard Wiese.

Shortly after he stepped down from the presidency, I reached Wiese on his cell phone as he transited Norway, heading for Spitsbergen, and thence the Russian Ice Station Borneo, where he would start skiing to the North Pole. Freed from the day-to-day hassles of running the Explorers Club, he was charging ahead with his guiding work for Expeditions. Among other duties, Wiese was tasked with developing a North Pole trip, as well as a climb of Everest. He now has two new titles: At the Explorers Club, he is welcomed as "president emeritus," while the American Museum of Natural History Expeditions calls him an "explorer in residence"—which smacks of commercial hype, given that he doesn't actually work in the museum. But so what? Like those oil studies on the walls of the Explorers Club, he's scaling up to a larger venue.

The club itself is probably in its best condition in decades, though the presidency has become a much tougher job. Wiese ended up persuading his successor, a wealthy Texas sportswear entrepreneur and amateur climber named Daniel Bennett, to run against three others. Bennett, 54, was elected just one day after joining the board of directors and says he hopes to see the club start funding expeditions again, as it did in the days of early Arctic research. But it's unlikely he'll be able to remix the place's pith-helmet DNA any more effectively than Wiese.

"Richard Wiese, TV character," meanwhile, remains a work in progress. Since "low-budget" also means "easy to renew," Litton Entertainment is considering re-upping Exploration with Richard Wiese. He may yet become the next iteration of America's explorer-entertainer of the airwaves, a role that's passed from Explorers Club stalwarts like Lowell Thomas, in the thirties, to Jim Fowler, in the seventies and eighties, and, earlier this year, to Josh Bernstein, the Indiana Jones–style host of the History Channel hit Digging for the Truth.

Stranger things have happened. Wiese came back from the North Pole two weeks later with all his fingers and toes, tan and burnished by the sun and wind into his natural colors of bronze and brass. He looks like he's going to be around for a while.