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."