Wild story. I’m guessing an adventure travel outfitter is already organizing an Amazon trek, complete with an overnight stay with the never-before-contacted tribe.

The last week has been particularly eventful at the top of the world. Near-perfect conditions at Mount Everest prompted a rush to its icy reaches, resulting in a record 75 climbers reaching the summit in a single day. (The highest previous total was 63 summits, in 2002.) One of those 75 climbers was Apa Sherpa, who also set a record of his own by summiting for the 18th time. According to the CBC, Canadian Andrew Brash was also among the 75. Brash became a minor celebrity two years ago when he gave up his first Everest attempt just 200 meters from the top to rescue a fellow climber.

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His ranking of U.S. beaches—annual pre-summer fodder for U.S. media—is out, and Caladesi Island State Park in Dunedin, Florida takes the top spot. Dr. Beach, aka Florida International University professor Stephen P. Leatherman, rates the beaches by 50 criteria. The rest of the Top 10 are: 

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"I expect to see more travelers slain, blown up and eaten by undersea predators in the near future,” writes Christopher Elliott. Greaaat.

Daniel Duane loves to eat wild salmon, which used to live in abundance off the West Coast of the United States and whose numbers are now crisis-level low. His home, the San Francisco Bay area, was once famous for its seafood. But many San Franciscans now get their seafood from elsewhere, like the rest of American supermarket shoppers. It’s an antiseptic setting, and it just won’t do for an outdoorsy foodie like Duane. So he traveled by seaplane to southeast Alaska to glimpse one of the last remaining American paradises and to catch “this beautiful food” in “a web of freshwater, saltwater, and surrounding wildlands healthy enough to generate 5 billion pounds of seafood year after year, without diminishing anything.”

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Interesting example of how user-generated info and hand-held GPS devices are changing travel.

It turns out that CNN’s Anderson Cooper has some inspiring things to say about travel. In an interview in the May 2008 Outside, he talks up an outfitter-led trip to Africa he took at the age of 17, after coming across an ad for the company in the back of Outside magazine. Interviewer Patrick Symmes mentions that many Americans are afraid to travel to places like Africa because they think, “This is going to suck.” To which Cooper responds: 

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The Tibet side of the mountain will be shut to down until May 10, effectively stopping climbers from making any serious tries at the summit this season. Why? 

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With that over-the-top headline, Time magazine begins addressing the safety of adventure tourism in the wake of the death of 49-year-old Austrian Markus Groh. He died last month during a shark-diving excursion off Great Issac Cay in the Bahamas. A shark bit his left leg, and he bled to death. Scuba Adventures, the Florida company that ran the trip Groh took, chummed the waters to draw sharks and eschewed cages for its clients. 

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Full title: “Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu”

Author: Laurence Bergreen, who also wrote “Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe” and biographies of Al Capone and Irving Berlin.

Released: Oct. 23, 2007

Travel genre: Historical footstep following

Territory covered: The Silk Road from, uh, Venice to Xanadu

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The hole in the cruise ship’s hull was “about the size of a fist,” according to a spokeswoman for the ship’s owner. If true, that’s all it took to sink the nearly 40-year-old Explorer, the first cruise ship built to ferry passengers in icy Antarctic waters. The G.A.P. Adventures-owned ship was in the midst of a 19-day “Spirit of Shackleton” trip when it hit submerged ice before dawn Friday, the Los Angeles Times reports. So began a harrowing ordeal that should put the usual Thanksgiving week travel headaches—congested highways, airport delays, etc.—into perspective.

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Graeme Wood travels to the seaside resort in the Republic of Georgia for a story in The Smart Set. It was once the playground of Soviet leaders like Stalin. Today, Wood writes, “all Russians know Abkhazia as the balmiest coast in the otherwise frigid ex-Soviet empire—‘a corner of Spain or Sicily,’ wrote one 19th-century explorer, ‘dropped at the foot of Old Man Caucasus.’”