Rumana was born and raised in Kulaura, Sylhet, Bangladesh, and has been living in Astoria, NYC, USA since 1998. Currently she is a US Citizen. Her trail names are “Clean Boots” and “Bengali Tigress”, given by her fellow hikers.
She is an avid backpacker/hiker and an aspiring mountaineer. She enjoys swimming and riding her bicycle in NYC streets. Rumana got into hiking as weekend escape from the city after getting sick of living a city life. She started with local day hikes, then backpacking, then into peakbagging. Now she climbs big mountains all over the world and wants to move to countryside where she can have pets roaming around!
Rumana was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) in May 2016, a full year after symptoms evidencing joint damage surfaced. For that year, she was misdiagnosed with osteoarthritis, due to her active, outdoorsy lifestyle. This only served to expedite the damage. Orthopedists advised her to simply “learn to live with the pain”. She “self-diagnosed” her symptoms to be related to RA and took the initiative to clinically confirm it. Without an early diagnosis and treatment, a person with RA becomes disabled in 5 to 10 years, which may had become her fate.
In the Northeast where she resides, she has completed climbing all of Northeast “115” 4000-footers. That list includes 46 Adirondack High Peaks and 67 4000-footers in New England including the 48 in White Mountains, New Hampshire (NH). She is a Catskills 35er and a Winter 35er. She is also a Saranac Lake 6er.
Worldwide, Rumana has reached the summits of two of the Seven Summits (seven highest points in each continent): Mount Kilimanjaro of Africa on Feb 24, 2017 and Mount Elbrus of Europe on June 22, 2017.
Within the USA, Rumana has reached the summit of a few of the Cascade Volcanoes, including Mount Adams on June 5, 2016, Mount Hood on June 19, 2016, and Mount Rainier on July 18, 2017. She summited two of Colorado 14ers including Huron Peak on Aug 27, 2015 and Mount Elbert on Aug 29, 2015 and turned around at 200 feet shy of Longs Peak’s summit due to bad weather on Aug 31, 2015. She has reached the summit of the highest point in contiguous USA Mount Whitney on June 17, 2015.
She has been to most of the national parks in the USA, including two in Alaska. She is also the founder of a meetup.com based outdoor group, called Mountain and Outdoor Bound – MOB, where she along with a few other experienced outdoor enthusiasts volunteer to host outdoor backpacking, hiking, kayaking, white water rafting trips.
She has an M.S. (2005) and a B.S. (2002) degrees in Computer Science and has been working in the field.