Granis Stewart in Surprise Cave, near Sing Sing prison in New York, in July 2007.

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Courtesy of Granis Stewart

CHARLESTOWN — Granis Stewart thrives on adventure.

She has traveled to some of the world’s most magnificent places: Mount Everest, the Arctic, Easter Island among them. She has pedaled 12,000 miles on a bicycle since 1986, across the United States and Canada. She set the women’s world spearfishing record three times. And she is among the internationally elite members of The Explorers Club.

Stewart, a 46-year-old resident of Charlestown, is a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. She returned on Aug. 22 from Israel, where she and a fellow adventurer went to raise money for another expedition. They plan to accompany four Holocaust survivors when they return to a 77-mile-long system of caves that hid them during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

In the fall, she plans to attend the coronation of the new king of Bhutan.

Stewart’s most enduring memories are not of places, but of the human connections she has made in her travels.

In 1989, she traveled to the Indonesian side of New Guinea. “I thought that it was one of the last wild places in the world, so I spent five weeks there, alone, just wandering around the jungle,” she said. “I stayed with the traditional tribal people, living in their huts and going out with the women every day to cultivate sweet potatoes. I was living the life of a Dani tribesperson as much as I could for five weeks.”

Before she left, the Dani men presented her with a set of hunting arrows, each designed to trap or kill a specific prey. She says she treasures the arrows and the memory of the people who crafted them.

In 1998, Stewart became a free diver, diving without air tanks. “From the first time I went in the water I loved everything about it. I was hooked from the first dive,” she told the Smith Alumnae Quarterly. Stewart graduated from Smith College when she was 31, after she had begun her nursing career.

On Sept. 7, 2005, Stewart set the women’s world spearfishing record for the third time when she shot a 55.3-pound striped bass in Block Island Sound. The fish was one foot shorter than the diver.

The record still stands.

STEWART WAS inducted into The Explorers Club — www.explorers.org — in 2006.

“The mission of The Explorers Club is the encouragement of scientific exploration of land, sea, air and space,” according to its charter. The Explorers Club members have included illustrious mountaineers such as Sir Edmund Hillary, astronauts and explorers from around the globe.

The club cited Stewart for anthropological research she conducted in Peru after she graduated from Smith. She was a research assistant to anthropologist and author Frederique Apffel-Marglin, who remains one of her dearest and closest friends, Stewart said.

Stewart has carried The Explorers Club flag around the world. “Just so you know, I’m not a trust fund baby — just a working stiff like everyone else,” she said. “I save every penny to travel the world. The only reason I have so many millionaire and billionaire friends is from The Explorers Club. I never hung out with that jet set crowd before 2006. I am so lucky; it’s like living a fairy-tale life. I just hope the pumpkin doesn’t appear anytime soon.”

HER RECENT TRIP to Israel was with fellow adventurer Kenneth Kamler, an orthopedic surgeon at Long Island Jewish Medical, in New York, and author of Doctor on Everest and Surviving the Extremes. They planned to meet with a mutual friend, an Israeli philanthropist, to secure financing for the expedition to Ukraine.

“It’s a really unbelievable story that has not yet been told,” Stewart said.

The four elderly Holocaust survivors were among 38 Ukrainian Jews, most of them members of the extended Stermer family, who hid in the caves during the early 1940s. They now live in the United States and Canada. Younger relatives will accompany them on their journey.

The group will be joined in Ukraine by a documentary film-making team.

They were all scheduled to depart for Ukraine earlier this month, but recent storms there have flooded parts of the cave and could endanger the elderly Holocaust survivors.

The logistics are tremendous. Forty-two people will make the trip, Stewart said, and the oldest is 88.

To enter the cave, everyone will have to negotiate a 50-foot vertical drop followed by a 100-foot crawl space, she said.

The trip to the caves may be put off until next year, Stewart said. The only remaining opportunity this year — in early autumn — would interfere, unacceptably, with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Both volunteers, the doctor and the nurse, each will bring a unique set of knowledge to the expedition, Stewart said. But both of them are accustomed to working in extreme conditions.

STEWART MAY travel to exotic places and mingle with the world-famous, but she hasn’t lost her appreciation for everyday experiences.

Among the people she remembers most vividly is a busload of elderly Americans at a rest stop in Canada. It was on one of her cycling expeditions, in 1988, when she pedaled 4,000 miles, solo.

Stewart was going broke in Nova Scotia. “I had very little money, and I was far away from home and far away from getting any money,” she remembers. “I had stopped at a rest stop to use the facilities and get a map to decide where I was going to sleep that night.

“A big tour bus pulled up, a big guy got out, and he said, ‘Hey, young lady, where are you going?’

“ ‘To Halifax,’ I said.

“ ‘Where did you start?’ he asked.

“ ‘North Dakota,’ I said.

“All of a sudden, he started summoning all these elderly people from the bus, telling them that this woman had just ridden her bike from North Dakota….

“One of the people said, ‘It must be very expensive to do a trip like this.’

“I said, ‘Yes, I don’t get many miles per stomach-full,’ and they all chuckled.

“I didn’t say a word about having no money, but before I knew it, someone pulled out her wallet and said, ‘Well, I want to buy your lunch,’ and she gave me a five-dollar bill.

“I had tears in my eyes, and when I looked up to thank her, there was a line forming.

“They all came up and introduced themselves … and gave me money. By the end, I had, like, fifty dollars. For me, that was like having a million dollars.

“The generosity of people toward a complete stranger just bowled me over.

“I’ll never forget it.”

tmeade@projo.com