Scaturro's hobby, which seems to be morphing into a full-time second career, is organizing and leading extreme expeditions, as in extremely long, challenging, remote, logistically complicated, or never before accomplished-sometimes all of the above. He calls his business Exploration Specialists International, which covers just about everything he does, for both fun and profit. Working 25 percent of his time as a geophysicist allows him to spend the other 75 percent indulging his wanderlust. He's been to Everest three times and summited on his second attempt, in 1998. In 2001, he led a large team to the mountain with the principal objective of putting the first blind climber, Erik Weihenmayer, on the summit. Scaturro was forced to turn back at 27,500 feet, due to a relapse of malaria that he had picked up in Africa, but Weihenmayer made it to the top and safely back down-along with 19 teammates, including 64-year-old Sherman Bull, who at the time was the oldest climber to have scaled Everest.

Three years later, in 2004, Scaturro became an adventure celebrity himself when the Imax film-production companies MacGillivray Freeman and Orbita Max recruited him to lead an expedition with the audacious goal of navigating the Blue Nile from its source in the Ethiopian highlands to the Mediterranean Sea, an unprecedented journey of roughly 3,500 miles. Bandits had murdered a number of people on previous expeditions, and ferocious rapids in the river's upper gorges had claimed others. But it was the length of the trip (114 days), particularly the desert passages across Sudan and Egypt, that presented the most daunting challenge. Producer Greg MacGillivray was sure monotony itself would defeat Scaturro and the expedition's cameraman, Gordon Brown.

"My fear was that any mere mortal would turn back out of sheer boredom," says MacGillivray. "But Pasquale never lost steam. He kept moving. He said he would do it, for me, for Gordon. I don't know any other person besides him who could have pulled it off." MacGillivray places Scaturro into an elite adventure league with super-alpinist Ed Viesturs and oceanographer Robert Ballard, who found the wreck of the Titanic. "Pasquale is one of those people who take on challenges that are almost unachievable and then push beyond that," MacGillivray says. "If it were easy, they wouldn't be interested."

Scaturro's starring role in Mystery of the Nile propelled him into a glamorous, hectic orbit. MacGillivray made him director of mountain operations for The Alps, a 2007 Imax documentary about climber John Harlin's attempt to scale the Eiger's north face, the hazardous rock wall that claimed his father's life. Back home, Scaturro was in demand as a speaker. One week he popped up in Boston lecturing executives on corporate team-building, the next he was in Albuquerque introducing the Nile movie's local premiere.

Serious money came knocking when an investment group asked if he was interested in looking for oil in Nigeria, Libya, and Kurdistan. "Kurdistan?" he snorted. "Don't you mean northern Iraq? In other words, you want me to work in the three most fucked-up places on the planet for two years?" Thanks, he said, but he had better things to do.

Namely, running Ethiopia's Omo River with his Colorado rafting buddies. As he conceived the expedition, the team would be lim­ited to eight people and two rafts. They would spend about two weeks on the river, a run he'd done twice before, in 1994 and 2001. But in typical Scaturro fashion, he proposed parking the rafts on the Lower Omo and trekking 60 miles across the Boma Plateau into southern Sudan-a region he calls "perhaps the last wilderness area in Africa." Afterwards, they'd keep boating to the Omo's terminus, in Kenya's Lake Turkana. The journey would span roughly 600 miles.

"Last time I was on the Omo," Scaturro wrote in an e-mail to me, "I decided that I wouldn't return unless it was to explore the area to the west of the river. This is that trip."

Southern Sudan? An area awash in automatic weapons, where a protracted civil war had only recently ended?

Not to worry, Scaturro said: He had arranged for a military escort. "We'll be met at the border by a colonel in the SPLA. Dude, you should come."