[2] His father was a school superintendent, as well as an amateur archaeologist, and Geist grew learning about Hallstatt, La Tene, and Roman archaeology.

[1] As a teenager, he worked as a apprentice in art metalworks, at a locomotive factory building trains for the Trans-Siberian Railway, and as a sightseeing bus driver.

[3] Geist remained in France after the end of the war, and drove visiting U.S. officials including Margaret Woodrow Wilson and the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.

He was discouraged by the economy of the Great Depression and his financial troubles led to a spurned marriage proposal by a banker's daughter; in 1923, he followed his brother Josef to Anchorage, Alaska.

He worked for the Alaska Railroad, as a dishwasher, as a miner in Bettles, Alaska, and as an engineer on board the sternwheeler Teddy R. While aboard the Teddy R., he met naturalists Olaus and Margaret Murie, who noticed his sense of curiosity and helped mentor him on scientific techniques for collecting and preserving archaeological and biological specimens, including field taxidermy.

[1] With Bunnell's support, he organized his first expedition in 1926 and traveling to the Bering Sea and Arctic regions to collect archaeological and ethnographic objects.

[9] In the late 1920s, Geist began collecting Pleistocene fossils from mining areas for the University and the Fairbanks Exploration Company, as well as the Frick Laboratory based at the American Museum of Natural History.

[10] The polar bear skulls were later realized as funerary objects, making their excavation illegal under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

[5] After completing service in the Alaska Territorial Guard in 1946, he returned to collecting fossils for UAF and the Frick Laboratory, and traveled to far flung places Cape Yakataga and Tanana Valley in the late 1940s on expeditions.