In October 2024, Tracee Metcalfe became the first American woman to climb all 14 of the world’s tallest mountains, each towering above 8,000 meters. Her journey demanded years of preparation and survival in some of the most unforgiving conditions—from the deadly slopes of Annapurna to the steep walls of K2.
In October 2024, Tracee Metcalfe became the first American woman to climb all 14 of the world’s tallest mountains, each towering above 8,000 meters. Her journey demanded years of preparation and survival in some of the most unforgiving conditions—from the deadly slopes of Annapurna to the steep walls of K2.
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Shelby Stanger:
The world's 14 tallest mountains are all located in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges in Asia. They each rise above 8,000 meters or 26,000 feet. At this elevation, the weather's unpredictable, the temperatures are extreme, and the air is so thin it's hard to breathe. The tallest and most famous of these peaks is Mount Everest. Though it's not necessarily the hardest to climb. K2 is steeper and Annapurna is deadlier. Summoning any one of them requires years of training, serious financial investment, and a massive amount of grit. In October 2024, Tracee Metcalfe, a doctor from Vail, Colorado, became the first American woman to climb all 14 of these mountains.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. An REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Tracee Metcalfe, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Your story is so interesting because I haven't talked to a lot of mountain climbers that are doing it completely unsponsored, on their own, and you have this huge record. How did you get to the mountains? Were you outdoorsy as a kid? Were you always interested in the outdoors growing up?
Tracee Metcalfe:
I really wasn't outdoorsy as a kid. I was really kind of a nerd, really focused on studies, drama, speech, not athletic things. I think mostly because my parents weren't super athletic, so that was just not something that I was encouraged to do. But I loved reading books about the outdoors. I loved reading mountain stories. And when I was about 12, my parents were getting a divorce and my dad really wanted, he and I, to have something we could do together, and so he started taking me to Park City to go skiing once a year, and that definitely inspired my love of mountains.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that you were nerdy growing up and had nothing to do with the outdoors and you're this record-breaking mountain climber today. This is amazing. How did you get into mountaineering and climbing and getting interested in outdoors in a bigger way? Because that's quite a leap going from nerdy, no sports to, "I climb 27,000 foot mountains plus."
Tracee Metcalfe:
So slowly. Right after high school, I was supposed to start college in January because they were sort of staggering the starts for college and I was going to go move out to Colorado for the eight months and just take whatever job I could take and just be in the mountains. There was something about the mountains that really called to me. I still remember the first time that I drove into Colorado. When I got to Glenwood Canyon and just saw how magnificent the canyon was and the river. I was just blown away that things like that were accessible. And once I moved to Breckenridge, Colorado, I decided that I was not going to return to school in LA like I was supposed to, and I reapplied to other colleges and ended up applying to the Colorado College in Colorado Springs and starting there a year later.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow. So you took this gap year and then it sounds like you studied medicine right away, or did you know wanted to be a doctor?
Tracee Metcalfe:
No, I mean, and I should clarify, when I took the gap year, nobody was doing it. My parents were really angry at me. The way I remember it is that they were almost like, "We're not going to support you in college if you do this." Because I think they were just worried because people didn't do that. But I knew I wanted to go back to school. I just realized that LA wasn't where I wanted to go to school. And when I first started studying in Colorado Springs at Colorado College, I had a big emphasis in biology and I kind of thought that I wanted to somehow do cancer research, which my dad had been diagnosed with leukemia and he's still alive and he's doing amazingly well.
But that really kind of impacted me. And I did pre-med because it was just a few more classes. And then I actually worked in a cancer research lab after college for two years, and I realized that I didn't like that. I think I need to be on the clinical side. I really like interacting with patients. I like hearing their stories. And so that's when I decided to apply to med school and thankfully got in to CU and went to school in Colorado.
Shelby Stanger:
During her time in Colorado, Tracee started spending more and more of her time in the mountains. After medical school, she moved to Seattle for her residency. The city was a perfect fit. It was home to leading cancer research institutes and on clear days, she could see Mount Rainier in the distance. During her residency, Tracee decided to climb Mount Rainier without a guide. To prepare, she practiced glacier travel, crevasse rescue, and rope systems. She summited Rainier twice and pretty soon after she was offered a chance to become a medic on Denali.
Tracee Metcalfe:
After residency, my first job was in Vail, Colorado doing primary care, which-
Shelby Stanger:
Amazing.
Tracee Metcalfe:
I was still thinking that I wanted to maybe do a fellowship for cancer, but my residency was really intense and I needed some time off. So I thought, "Well, I'll take this job in Vail, Colorado, kind of get back to the mountains and then I can always apply for a fellowship the next year if I'm ready." And then you can see this story, you can predict how it ended. I did not go back to do a fellowship, but stayed in Vail. So my first job was doing primary care and the way I got the job working on Denali is sort of funny.
I was heli-skiing with some friends in Alaska and we had a female heli-ski guide and she was just amazing. This woman, Leanne, and I remember I was just in awe of her and how she had, because heli-ski guiding at that time was definitely a man's world.
Shelby Stanger:
There were no female heli guide skiers. That's crazy.
Tracee Metcalfe:
No, we actually had two females and I think because it was me and my other girlfriend. Maybe they were trying to show us, "Look, we have some female guides."
Shelby Stanger:
It's cool though. Good for them.
Tracee Metcalfe:
Right. It was awesome. So anyways, Leanne said, "I see that you love skiing and you have a good attitude. And my husband, Tucker, is a ranger on Denali and they always need a doctor for each of their patrols in the summer." And I remember being like, "Oh my gosh, I've climbed rainier, but I am not qualified for this." And then she was like, "No, no, no, as the doctor, you don't need to be the expert on the ropes and the crevasse rescue, and you will learn all that when you're there." So I talked to her husband, Tucker, he convinced me that the prerequisites were really to be physically fit, and to have a good attitude, and to have... We were going to do it all on skis, not to the summit, but to travel up to 14,000 feet.
So he was like, "It seems like you have all the prerequisites." So he invited me to be part of a patrol on Denali.
Shelby Stanger:
What was that like?
Tracee Metcalfe:
It was awesome. It was terrifying. It was a lot of things. I definitely was a little... I was pretty terrified when I agreed to do it. And I spent all my free time training with a big heavy pack because I just didn't want to be the weak member of the team, even though I was the doctor. So I was like, "Probably no one expects me to be the strongest, but I don't want to be the weakest either." And then when I got there, I remember I was pretty intimidated. The two other volunteers from our group were ski patrollers from Jackson Hole, and they've both become lifelong friends. But at the time I was like, "Oh my goodness. There's professional ski patrollers here."
I was very intimidated, but after a little while, after we practiced lowering each other into crevasses, I got to realize that these were really nice people and that I knew some things that they didn't know about medicine. And so it was awesome. We were busy that summer. Unfortunately, somebody died skiing, that we had to rescue their body. And that was, I realized the first time... I'd seen death in the hospital a lot, but I'd never seen death in the mountains. And so that was sobering to me. I had kind of had these fantasies that maybe someday I wanted to ski Denali. And after seeing that, I really realized how serious of a mountain Denali is.
Shelby Stanger:
Tracee spent two seasons as a doctor on Denali, and eventually she started dreaming about doing the same thing on Mount Everest. A friend put her in touch with an expedition company in the Himalayas that was looking for a doctor to join their team. Before Tracee worked on Everest, the company offered her a position on Manaslu, an 8,000-meter peak where she could test her skills at altitude.
Tracee Metcalfe:
And I was like, "Great, sign me up. I want to be the doctor on Manaslu." And so I did that as the base camp doctor, but I wasn't on the permit to try to summit. And after doing that for a year, not a full year at all, I mean the expeditions are six weeks, so they're short expeditions. But after that first year, I thought, "You know what? This is really cool, but I don't want to sit at base camp. I want to see what's at the top of the mountain." So basically after working for a couple of seasons on Manaslu with Russell Bryce as his base camp doctor, he said, "I think you're ready to come to Everest." And I said, "That's great. I said, I don't think I want to go unless I can climb with the climbers."
And at that point, he trusted me because we'd worked together and he'd seen me climb. I don't know if he believed I would do it, but he said, "Instead of paying you, we could use your money and then you don't have to pay and you could have a permit and you can try to climb with the team." It was a trade and that worked. I got to summit Everest. So my first real try on an 8,000-meter peak was Everest in 2016, and I got to climb with our five person... We had five paying clients, five Sherpas, one guide, and I got to climb with them all the way to the summit. It was the most amazing experience.
Shelby Stanger:
I love that. So you traded to climb Everest, you gave your medical... What would've happened though if you were the one who needed medical help?
Tracee Metcalfe:
Right? So I had to balance that. I feel like I did everything in my power to be over prepared for that trip and to not push myself. In reality, probably the Everest ER is still at Everest, so if I was really needing that type of care, I'm sure I would've been taken over there. But I was doing everything in my power to be over-prepared for the trip so that I wouldn't be a liability and wouldn't need care. So at this point, I had climbed Denali and I think in some ways Denali can be harder than Everest. That's a controversial thing to say. It depends on the person, it depends on the year. But on Denali, even though it's a much lower mountain, it's only 20,000 feet.
It is really far north on the globe, and the further away you are from the equator, there's less oxygen in the air. So the fact that it's 20,000 feet, it actually feels more like it's 22 to 23,000 feet and it's very cold and there's no one carrying anything for you on Denali. On Everest, part of the deal is there's Sherpas there, and even most of the time... Even if you're trying to be a totally independent climber on Everest, Sherpas are putting fixed rope in, they're making footsteps. And in my case, they were carrying our tents and our stoves. And on Denali, none of that's happening. So in many ways Denali's hard because you're on the mountain for several...
When I was there, I was probably on the mountain for 28 days with no shower, no nothing. And on Everest, you have this nice base camp where there's... I mean, it's not a nice shower, but it's a shower with heated water and there's a cook tent and people are preparing you food. And on Denali, you're doing all that yourself. So for me, I thought that I was... I kind of knew what I was in for, and obviously on Everest, the altitude is much more extreme, but I was using oxygen. I don't know that I have the capability to do it without oxygen, but that wasn't even something to discuss as the doctor. I was absolutely going to be using oxygen above 23,000 feet. So I kind of felt like I knew how to manage cold.
I felt like I knew how to train, and in some ways I thought, "This is going to be a little bit easier because someone's going to be cooking my food at base camp and I'm going to be able to stay clean."
Shelby Stanger:
Tracee's time on Denali, Manaslu, and Everest showed her what she was capable of. Once she returned from Nepal, she knew she was ready for bigger adventures. Her ambition led her to make history as one of the most impressive mountaineers in the country. A year before Tracee Metcalfe summited Mount Everest in 2016, she had a hip replacement. She was in her late thirties at the time and knew that this procedure was necessary if she wanted to keep climbing big mountains. On a physical level, the surgery worked well and Tracee was able to climb Everest.
Afterward, she went on to climb two other 8,000 meter peaks, Cho Oyu in Tibet and Makalu in Nepal. But while she was achieving these remarkable feats, Tracee was also struggling to overcome a battle with addiction that started soon after hip surgery.
Tracee Metcalfe:
I had been struggling with, I was drinking too much on my time off, and I had become addicted to Percocet after my hip surgery. And so I was struggling with addiction. And in 2019 when I got back from Makalu had, it was like I felt so happy that I had climbed Makalu, but it felt honestly like imposter syndrome because there was this part of me that people didn't know about that I was drinking too much and that I was struggling with addiction. And so I found AA and I got sober at that time.
I had a couple of hiccups, but at this point I've had continuous sobriety since September of 2022. And so it was, I think for me, kind of admitting that to people I worked with and then getting the help I needed. It felt like I should pause on work for a little bit and decide, do I want to keep being a hospitalist or do I want to do something different with medicine and with the second half of my life?
Shelby Stanger:
I really appreciate you sharing that because I think we have countless people on here that struggle with addiction and I think addiction and sometimes these big endurance adventures go hand in hand and addiction runs in my family. And it's also really common after hip surgery or a big surgery for people to get addicted to painkillers. That's happened in my own family. It's happened in probably a lot of people's family. So thank you and good on you for getting sober. It's a journey, and I'm sure you're going to help a lot of people who are listening to you talk about that. You confronted your addiction, which I think is one of the biggest mountains to climb. And then you continue to climb these other mountains.
Tracee Metcalfe:
So I was mostly sober, but I had a couple of slip ups where I would drink and celebrate, but for the most part, I was living a life of sobriety from then on. But 2022 was when I finally said, "You know what? I don't need to even have a celebration after climbing a mountain." I do need to have a celebration, but it doesn't need to involve alcohol or drugs. There's other more healthy ways to celebrate. And it wasn't until I did Annapurna, which was my fourth 8,000-meter peak summit, which was for me the hardest, the most challenging mountain, the most dangerous, that then I kind of... Something just changed in my brain and it was like, "You've just done the objectively most dangerous and hardest peak in Nepal in the world probably, in my opinion."
And that was when I was, for the first time, really being honest with people in my life about what was going on, what I'd struggled with. And it's hard, I don't think I'm unique as a doctor, but I will say as a medical professional, I think the public is pretty understanding. I think other doctors, they're kind of harsh because they don't want to believe. They want to believe that we're immune from disease and addiction is a disease and just being a doctor doesn't vaccinate you from it. Mostly people were supportive in my life, but it was definitely... Those were some hard years for me. And I think mountain climbing gave me... That just let me get away from all that and be in nature.
And it was me, my training, the mountain, the people that are there. Nobody in Nepal needed to know my story of what was going on back home. Nobody cared. Right? They cared what I could do on the mountain and how we could work together.
Shelby Stanger:
After summoning Annapurna, Tracee had successfully climbed four of the 14 tallest mountains in the world. Fewer than a hundred people have climbed all 14 of them, and no American woman had ever done it. This challenge had been in the back of Tracee's mind ever since she summited Everest. Now that she was a third of the way through, she decided to go all in and climb all 14 peaks. Just a warning, this part of our conversation contains a description of a tragic event that happened during one of her summit bids. So then somewhere between 2022 and 2025, you climbed 10?
Tracee Metcalfe:
Yeah. (affirmative)
Shelby Stanger:
Wow.
Tracee Metcalfe:
I decided to quit my job completely and try to finish this project in a couple of years if I could. I wanted to try to finish it as close to my 50th birthday as I could. I ended up climbing my last mountain a few months after my 50th birthday. So I didn't quite make the goal, but it was close enough, and it wasn't a hard and fast goal. But a few things happened. Basically, there's a climber named Nims Purja, he has a documentary on Netflix called 14 Peaks. And the reason I mentioned it is that prior to... It was 2019 when he did that, and I remember I was on Makalu and we were hearing about this guy, Nims, who was doing these peaks back to back. And as a physician, I was thinking, "Is that going to work?
Is his body going to have enough time to recover? He's using oxygen and he's flying from base camp to base camp." But the training we had was kind of like, the most you should do in a season is two or three, and then here he goes, and he does all 14 in less than a year. And that just changed the industry for better or for worse. As soon as people saw that you could do that, then paying clients started thinking, "Well, if I'm taking all the time to train for a mountain and then I'm spending a couple of weeks on the mountain getting acclimatized, why wouldn't I want to do two or three?" Because part of what takes a long time about climbing the mountains is sitting, going up, and down from base camp to get acclimatized.
So after he did that, I would say the industry changed. I was kind of being around seeing this and being exposed to these ideas and seeing that the human body could do it. And so I thought, "Well, why not?" Right? I'm not a super athlete, but it seems like it makes more sense to me to take two years off. I have money saved. I'm going to have to dip into my retirement stuff. The way I sort of told myself was that it's like I'm doing some of my retirement now, and then I'll work later on the second end. And with the hip replaced, I knew I had to have a knee replaced. I felt like my time to climb mountains was finite because of my body. And so for me, I was like, "I'm all in. I'm going to try to do this in a couple of years and get it done." And that's what I did.
Shelby Stanger:
Incredible. Is there one that stands out as the most memorable
Tracee Metcalfe:
Of those? Shishapangma, the last one was the most memorable for so many reasons. It was the site of a tragedy. So in 2023, I actually tried to do Shishapangma after Manislu. And when I was there with my team, four people were killed in two separate avalanches. They were not on our team, they were on different teams. But one of the women was my friend Gina, and it was... Basically Gina and another American woman named Anna were competing to be the first US woman to finish all 14 peaks. And I think that they got really caught up, instead of working together, each one trying to be the first, and the conditions were pretty dangerous that year. And there was two separate avalanches.
So I saw the avalanche that killed Anna, and then I turned around because I was upset and terrified that there would be more avalanches. And then found out that a second avalanche had killed Gina and Lama, the Sherpa that she was climbing with, and they were buried and their bodies were never recovered.
Shelby Stanger:
I don't even know what that would be like.
Tracee Metcalfe:
We could see their bodies down there. And I remember thinking, "I'm a back country skier, so I've been involved in some avalanches before." And I remember thinking, "Their bodies are on top. That's great. They're fine." But they were far, I don't know, I'm so bad with feet, but a couple of football fields away. So I could see their bodies and I could see that they weren't moving. And then right away, two of the Sherpas who were much closer to them moved in to examine them and determined that they were both dead and had pretty... They had severe injuries that were not compatible with life. And so I kind of went from, "Should I go down there? Is there anything I can do to help?"
Well, first I thought they were fine, so it was relief, and then it was like, "They're not moving. Is there anything I can do as a doctor to help?" And then it's getting more information on the radio. No, their injuries are not compatible with life. There's nothing to do. And probably we should just get out of here because for people who don't know, once an avalanche occurs just from somebody moving or walking, that it means the snow is really unstable and it means that it's really likely that there's going to be more avalanches. It's not like, "It just released, now it's safe." No, there's all these other places where there's still other unstable snow that's going to come down.
It's not safe to stay there and you want to get out of there. So some people wanted to keep climbing. I did not. Between the tragedy and the fact that I just knew it was unsafe, I just started heading down immediately.
Shelby Stanger:
Shishapangma wasn't Tracee's only unsuccessful summit. In the process of climbing these 14 peaks, she ended up going on a total of 21 expeditions to Nepal, Pakistan, and Tibet. After her experience on Shishapangma, she successfully crossed a few other peaks off her list, but she had to return to the mountain in order to complete the project. So how did you go back to Shish?
Tracee Metcalfe:
So how did I go back? That's a good question. So I thought a lot about not going back and making it project 13. I like the number 13, and I thought, "You know what? I think 13 peaks might be good enough." And then I had a year to sort of think about it, and what I eventually realized was that I know myself and that at some point, maybe it wouldn't be a year, maybe it would be five years, I would want to go back to that mountain. And the thought of going back to that mountain with strangers versus my team who I was there with when the trauma happened was horror. I just thought, "That's not the closure I want. That's not the ending I want to my story. I want to go back with same people who were there so that together we can talk about what we saw last year and we can share stories."
That's the only thing that makes sense to me. And when I finally decided to go back and I summited with my team, there was just something so special about all of us as a team going back, having success in a place that had been really tragic. I think in some ways it felt spiritual to me. Maybe the spirits of the people who died were there. And so that was the most meaningful one for me, for sure.
Shelby Stanger:
What was it like getting to the top?
Tracee Metcalfe:
It was really special. I mean, it was magical in many ways. It was harder than I expected. I kind of thought that when we walked through the area where the avalanches had happened, that that would be sort of the crux emotionally or maybe even physically. And we decided to go a slightly different route than the teams were going the year that the avalanches happened, but we still had to cross where they had walked. And so we crossed that part at sunrise, and that was... I don't know, there was just something magical about the way the mountain was sparkling, about seeing the sunrise, thinking of new beginnings, things like that. And then when we got to the final summit ridge, it was a lot harder than I expected.
So normally you approach it from one side. And this year we were approaching it from a different side, and when we kind of popped out what we thought was the top, it turned out to be a false summit. And so there was still a knife edge ridge with really deep snow that we had to get across. And I thought for a minute, I thought for several hours we might not get across that. We might not be able to make it. And different Sherpas on our team kept trying to put anchors in. And finally, one of the younger Sherpas, he just took all the gear and he went and fixed a couple of anchors ahead of the veteran Sherpas and then opened it up so that we were able to then clip into the anchors and get to the summit. And I got up there and I'm always a little terrified.
All I'm thinking about when I get to the summit is, "How am I going to get back down?" And so I remember getting up there and everybody's hugging and singing songs and making videos and flying their flags. And I tried to take a little time just to be so grateful that I'd made it there and to think about Gina and the people who had died. And then I was like, "I got to get out of here. When are we going down?" And so I think I was the first one on our group. Everybody was still making movies, and I was like, "Can I start getting down? I'll do my celebration when I get to base camp. I don't like to linger on summits."
Shelby Stanger:
I wouldn't either. I mean, going down is often harder than getting up. Is that correct?
Tracee Metcalfe:
Absolutely. And you're tired. I mean, you're as far away from safety as you're going to be and you're exhausted.
Shelby Stanger:
Tracee made that summit on October 4th, 2024, making her the first American woman to climb the 14 highest peaks in the world. Tracee is currently working on opening her own medical practice and she's also set a new goal. To climb the 100 tallest mountains in Colorado. To keep in touch with Tracee, you can find her on Instagram at mountainmd13. That's M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N-M-D-1-3. Wild Idea is Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative.
Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.