"Lotus Expeditions offers the best of independent travel and travel with a guided tour company. Their leaders are well tested, knowledgeable, and very personable so that their trips feel like the freedom of traveling on your own. Yet their organization and care will enable you to relax and enjoy the attention of a well-run adventure travel company."
- John Shanahan, Colorado

"A mind stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Raleigh Coburn

Raleigh Coburn is the founder and owner of Lotus Expeditions.  She has fifteen years of outdoor education and guiding experience and over twenty years of international travel experience. She has traveled, trekked, climbed, lived, worked, and studied in more than 30 countries.  She is fluent in Spanish and speaks Nepali.

Raleigh's guiding and teaching career includes nine years working as a Mountaineering Instructor (and reality TV star) for Outward Bound in Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Colorado, Nepal and Chile.  She also guided trips to Nepal and Tibet for Seattle-based Mountain Madness for several years and free-lanced as a private guide in Asia and South America.

In recent years she left the field to explore a degree in Nursing and subsequently worked several seasons as an EMT-B at a ski area clinic in Colorado.  But while climbing Ama Dablam in Nepal in 2003 she realized her future was not in the medical field and thus was born Lotus Expeditions....

In addition to running US operations for Lotus Expeditions and working as lead guide, she is an instructor for The Women's Wilderness Institute, a Colorado-based non-profit working to improve the strength, self-confidence and leadership skills of girls and women through adventure activities.

She currently resides in Ouray, Colorado with her husband, New Zealand native, Paul McElrea.  In her spare time she pursues all forms of skiing, climbing, mountaineering, mountain biking, kayaking and yoga.  Her newest passion is fly fishing.