The Grudge Report

TOM AND TINA SJOGREN, the founders of ExplorersWeb, are rugged adventurers, as hardy as they come. They’d have to be to last so long in room 217 of the Arapahoe Inn. It’s the cheapest motel in Keystone, Colorado, and it offers pretty much every feature employed by a manager trying to shave pennies off his overhead, including dorm-grade furniture, a polyester bedspread in teal-and-purple camo, and halls as dark as the tunnels of Cu Chi.

The Sjogrens, who are wealthy but thrifty, have endured the Arapahoe for six weeks already. This is their home at the moment—they’ve sublet their expensive Manhattan loft—which also makes room 217 the current HQ of ExplorersWeb (explorersweb.com), one of the world’s most avidly read and argued-about online hubs for hardcore adventurers. The site, which debuted in 1999, is an information-jammed clearinghouse for breaking news about expeditions, feats, and rescue missions, as well as a no-holds-barred forum for manifestos, rants, and interviews with mountaineers, trekkers, and explorers of every kind.

Planning to climb Pakistan’s Broad Peak in winter? Crossing the Arabian Sea in a pedal boat? ExWeb’s got you covered, practically by the minute, and will be the first to offer congratulations or catcalls, depending on what the Sjogrens think of your exploits.

As a voice of the far-flung, the heavily trafficked ExplorersWeb has established a reach that may be unparalleled for a site of its kind. When Tom and Tina broke the news last year that stranded Everest climber Lincoln Hall was alive and had been rescued—earlier, his expedition leader sent out a press release saying he was dead—the site logged 100,000 visitors. There would have been more, but it crashed under the load.

ExplorersWeb also reaches far beyond its readership, because it serves as a feeder for the mainstream media. In a typical three-month period, Tina says, she got requests for reporting leads from more than 20 different outlets, including Reuters, AP, the BBC, The New York Times, National Geographic, Climbing, Outside, and even Al Jazeera.

Show up at room 217, as I did one evening during a snowstorm in March, and you’ll see what looks like a spy-movie stakeout. Tom has a laptop set up on a desk overlooking a snow-covered Highway 6. Though March is a relatively slow month for news, Tina still spends most of each day on the bed with a laptop balanced on her legs, editing dispatches. (ExWeb is busiest in May, when readers are following expeditions on Everest.) Equipment is piled everywhere. Waterproof, shockproof Pelican cases are stacked against a wall; a corner is filled with plastic bins full of adapters and cables. All around are random heaps of HP iPaq PDAs, Thuraya satellite phones, and Nera sat modems.

Tom, 47, is Swedish. He’s a trim five-eleven, his skin burnished from the wind and cold. He keeps his sable hair tightly cropped and favors black and gray T-shirts, designer denim, and sandals.

Tina, 48, is a Swedish citizen who was born in Czechoslovakia back when it was under Soviet control. She has light-blue eyes and a giant frizz of blond hair, which she generally tames with a wool hat screwed down almost to the top of her eyebrows.

Both of them are perpetually busy, working from eight in the morning until ten at night, every day. Tina usually tends ExWeb, with help from paid freelance correspondents and editors in New York, Sweden, and Spain. Tom oversees a lucrative side business that involves selling satellite-ready communications packages to explorers, under the brand name HumanEdgeTech. The software and hardware—which Tom helped create—are bundled as a product called Contact 4.0, which allows explorers to manage Web sites from just about any location.

Tom expects that 15 to 20 Everest expeditions will use his $3,000 packages this season, and he’s also sold them to NASA, the U.S. Army, and the USGS. The entire operation is breaking even, he says, with Contact 4.0 sales making up for the small annual deficits from ExplorersWeb.

Right now, Tom is on overdrive: He has to get out 17 packages in the next three days, and a client is coming over from Denver tonight at eight. Which leaves Tom and Tina just enough time for a tasty snack. Tina bounds off the bed, pulls ingredients out of a mini-fridge, and whips up a dill-crab-and-spinach sandwich.

“It’s Swedish,” she says. “Very healthy.”

FOR THE SJOGRENS, ExplorersWeb is not so much a news portal as a calling. They created it after climbing Everest without guides in 1999; they had found little reliable information for independent climbers like themselves, so they posted what they’d learned as a way to “give back.” Initially the site was called MountEverest.net, focusing mainly on news from the world’s highest peak. Over time it evolved into ExplorersWeb—a catchall site with links to specific topics like Everest, Oceans, Poles, and Space.

When you ask the Sjogrens why they do it, they talk about their motivations in nearly religious terms. “My grandfather was ten years in prison under the Soviets, for printing political stuff,” Tina explains. “He was one of those guys who told it like it was. Much of ExplorersWeb comes from that.”

They also give it up for Mother Teresa, whom they met while backpacking through India in 1985. Their visit was brief but powerful. “She sent us on our way to do our work in the world,” says Tina. “It changed our lives. She blessed us to do good, really.”

Sounds joyous, but their mission often leads to harsh coverage that many people find hard to take, and favorite target=s include prominent commercial guides, outfitters, and explorers who, one way or another, don’t meet with Tom and Tina’s approval. It was ExplorersWeb that, right or wrong, accused Everest guide Russell Brice of malfeasance because the Sjogrens think he should have tried harder to save the life of independent climber David Sharp in 2006. It was ExplorersWeb that accused Everest outfitter Henry Todd of supplying faulty oxygen to climbers. And, day after day, it is ExplorersWeb that practically tape-measures the claimed feats of dozens of adventurers, often causing anger, outrage, and embarrassment.

“I do think they run witch hunts,” says Ed Douglas, a lifelong climber and journalist who’s written about mountaineering for 20 years. “Their moral outrage is not helpful … it’s bad for climbing.”

Others counter that the Sjogrens’ high-handedness is usually justified. One fan is Michael Kodas, a writer with The Hartford Courant who’s finishing a book about the modern ugliness on Everest.

“There’s a great need for coverage of what’s happening on the mountain,” he says. “A lot of what Tom and Tina say is dead-on, though some of it is completely outrageous. I have a lot of respect for them. If ExWeb wasn’t doing this stuff, nobody would. They really have changed the face of adventuring.”

As adventurers, the Sjogrens are the real thing. They’ve climbed Everest and attempted McKinley. In 2002 they skied unsupported to the South Pole, a 63-day journey. They rested for a month and then headed for the North Pole, which they reached after 67 days, making Tina the first woman to ski to both poles unsupported. They’re now training for a two-person climb on K2 in 2008—unguided—which is why they moved from New York to Keystone. With business so good, unfortunately, it’s getting hard to find time to train.

Their lives have always been a little crazy. Tina escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1968, at age nine, with her 29-year-old mother and one-year-old brother, leaving her father, a loyal Communist, behind. Tom was a competitive figure skater and a member of the Swedish national sailing team in the late seventies and early eighties.

They met when they were both 20 and started traveling the world. In 1986, they launched a Swedish business called Easy-shop, which delivers regularly scheduled shipments of toilet paper to customers. (“It’s a steady business,” says Tom, “and I’ve heard all the jokes.”) They got rich off it, giving them the freedom to expand their adventures, starting with Everest in 1996. They tried to summit four years in a row, failing the first three times. They took a break to sail across the Atlantic, setting out from the Canary Islands in November 1998 on an O’Day 37, a relatively modest sailboat for a crossing, arriving in St. Lucia in February 1999. They went back to Everest and bagged it that May.

Next, they moved to Manhattan, feeling pretty good about life. “We had summited Everest, crossed the ocean, and we were millionaires,” Tom says. Their first apartment was a penthouse on Central Park South. That felt too staid, so in 2000 they moved to a SoHo loft that became the base for ExplorersWeb until this spring.

After K2, their overarching desire is to take their act off-planet and—somehow, someway—get themselves to Mars. They aren’t kidding. Their goal is to be en route by 2014. They figure the project can be done privately for as little as $50 million to $100 million, and they plan to raise their own money. They’re ready to die in the attempt, if that’s what it takes.

“We talk about dying,” says Tina. “The only prayer I’ve made is that if we go, we go together.”

SNICKER IF YOU LIKE, but their idealism is sincere, and, at its best, ExplorersWeb is defined by it. The most compelling example is the story of the killing of 17-year-old Buddhist nun Kelsang Namtso at Nangpa La.

Nangpa La is a Himalayan pass a few miles to the west of Cho Oyu, the sixth-highest mountain in the world, and it’s a common route for refugees fleeing Tibet for Nepal. On September 30, 2006, Namtso was killed with a long-range rifle by the Chinese border police as she tried to cross. The shooting happened within sight of Cho Oyu advance base camp, in full view of some 100 people.

Word got out two days later, on October 2. Tina checked her e-mail and found a note from Luis Benitez, a Boulder-based guide who’d taken blind climber Erik Weihenmayer to the top of Everest in 2001.

“There is a story that happened here on the 30th and the 1st that is not being told,” Benitez wrote. He described glancing out of his team’s dining tent to see a line of Tibetans headed up the pass, hearing gunfire, watching the Tibetans break into a run, and then seeing two people gunned down. Though the facts coming in were sketchy, Tom and Tina went ahead with a tentative story headlined “Cho Oyu ABC Swarmed by Chinese Army—Tibetans Shot at Nangpa La?”