Adventuring News

Yesterday, Pemba Dorje Sherpa, a Nepalese professional mountaineer, scaled Mount Everest in 8 hours and 10 minutes, setting a new record for the fastest climb. Mr. Dorje, 27, left base camp at 6 p.m. and climbed all night along the traditional southeast ridge route. Using flashlights, and near the top, oxygen tanks, he reached the summit at 2:10 a.m. The climb broke the record of 10 hours and 46 minutes set last May by his climbing rival, Lakpa Gelu Sherpa, 36. It was Mr. Dorje's second ascent in a week: he had accompanied a Swiss economist, Rupert Heider, to the top of the mountain last week without supplemental oxygen.

On Wednesday, a Nepalese woman climber, Lhakpa Sherpa, climbed Mount Everest for the fourth time from the Tibetan route, becoming the first woman to climb the mountain more than three times.

On Thursday, Shiroko Ota, a 63-year-old Japanese woman, died after becoming the second-oldest woman to climb to the 29,035-foot summit. She slipped not long after she began her descent, only about 1,000 feet below the summit. While her safety rope broke the fall, Ms. Ota fell unconscious and her climbing companions were unable to pull her up. She died dangling from the end of her rope. By radio from Japan, her family members urged the five other climbing members in the group to leave her body and descend to safety. An attempt to recover the body was planned for Friday. Ms. Ota started climbing mountains when she was about 40 and conquered Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain, in 2001.

Also on Friday, a Tibetan climbing association found the bodies of three South Koreans after they were reported missing earlier this week as they descended Everest. Two had suffered exhaustion and became disoriented in the thin air of the high altitude; the third got lost while trying to rescue the others.

Since 1953, a total of 1,373 people have climbed Everest from the Nepali and the Chinese sides. During that half century, 178 people have died on the mountain - a mortality rate of 13 percent. There are currently 64 expeditions on the mountain, racing to reach the summit before the climbing season closes, probably in 10 days.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, four men and two women finished a 4,160-mile journey along the Nile River, navigating the world's longest river from its source to the Mediterranean Sea in what is believed to be the first time in modern times. The team, led by Hendri Coetzee, a professional whitewater rafter from South Africa, had set off from Jinja, Uganda, where the Nile flows out of Lake Victoria, on Jan. 17 and paddled and rowed through rapids for the first 940 miles. A crocodile chased one of the rafts below Murchison Falls, and the team heard a leopard walking around the camp while they were sleeping on the bank in Murchison park. In northwestern Uganda, the rafters paddled nonstop for 48 hours to avoid the Lord's Resistance Army, a group known for kidnapping and looting. The team was also quite tense when it crossed into southern Sudan, because of the civil war there, and had to cross about six different front lines because control of the river alternated between government soldiers and Sudan People's Liberation Army rebels. In Padak, southern Sudan, they took on outboard motors for the rest of the river, stopping for sightseeing, fuel and food, and to obtain security clearances.

On April 28, adventure guide Pasquale Scaturro and film-maker Gordon Brown, accompanied by an IMAX film crew, became the first explorers to complete a full descent of the Blue Nile. The group traveled 3,250 miles, filming the journey from the river's headwaters in Ethiopia to the finish line of Alexandria, on Egypt's Mediterranean shores. Equipped with two 16-foot, self-bailing inflatable rafts and a hard shell kayak, the group faced monster rapids, malaria threats and the war-torn shores of Sudan. Scaturro, a Colorado-based geophysicist and leader of the expedition, is best know for leading blind climber Eric Weihenmayer to the summit of Everest in 2001.