Inside a Vail Woman’s Harrowing Pursuit of the World’s Highest Mountains

Tracee Metcalfe plodded through the thin air of Tibet, toward a distant white pinnacle. Shishapangma’s summit was still a few hours away but in sight. Extending 26,335 feet into the sky, “Shish” is the shortest of the world’s 14 tallest peaks, all of which top 8,000 meters, and features a technically manageable route to the apex, relative to other eight-thousanders. It also has a history of deadly avalanches.

It was October 7, 2023—a breezy but clear day in the Himalayas. Ahead of Metcalfe, a then 49-year-old internal medicine doctor from Vail, three Nepali guides fixed a rope in deep snow to provide the climbers more security as they negotiated a steep slope to the top. There was a lone woman in the trail-breaking group, and Metcalfe recognized her: Anna Gutu, 33, one of two mountaineers trying to become the first American woman to finish the eight-thousanders, a crowning feat in mountaineering. Her competition was 45-year-old Gina Rzucidlo, a friend of Metcalfe who was also on the mountain that day; Rzucidlo and Metcalfe had had tea together just days before. Both Rzucidlo and Gutu had completed 13 of the 14 peaks, with only Shish left on their lists.

By then, the third day of the climb, it was well known that Rzucidlo and Gutu were racing to the summit, alongside their respective Sherpas. Rzucidlo started behind Gutu that morning, but as the rope fixers approached the steeper pitch, Gutu saw her rival catching up and took off. Rzucidlo chased after. “You’ve got this,” Metcalfe told Rzucidlo as she passed in the queue. “You’re going so fast.” Gutu and Rzucidlo quickly distanced themselves from Metcalfe’s group, whose leaders stopped fixing the rope as the others scampered ahead. The lack of an anchored line meant the dueling Americans were attached only to their Sherpa guides as they approached the so-called “death zone” above 8,000 meters.

Not long after, Metcalfe spotted an avalanche rumbling down the slope to her left. She couldn’t make out the fracture line above, but after the chunky debris stopped churning, she saw two climbers resting on top of it—later identified as Gutu and Mingmar Sherpa. Oh, thank God, she thought. They’re fine. Then she realized they weren’t moving. Metcalfe’s physician mindset kicked in. She turned to her climbing partner, Tamting Sherpa, known as Mama, who was listening to radio chatter in Nepali. “Mama, should I go down there?” Metcalfe asked. “What’s going on? Can I help?” She repeated those questions, getting the same answer each time: “No, you’re just going to be in the way. They’re dead.”

Metcalfe looked at the others congregated at 25,100 feet, many of whom needed the summit for their personal checklists. Compact and strong—despite climbing on an artificial hip and a failing knee and using a steroid inhaler twice a day to manage her asthma— Metcalfe had topped nine eight-thousanders but never threatened Rzucidlo or Gutu for the record. (Rzucidlo had reassured her that “even third would be really good.”) “I don’t know what the rest of you are doing, but I’m done,” Metcalfe said. “I’m going down.”

Another climber scoffed: “What? You’re a doctor. Don’t you see death all the time? We can keep climbing.”

“You’re a fucking moron,” Metcalfe snapped. Emotional trauma aside, she knew that continuing to climb on the same aspect and elevation where an avalanche had just occurred was potentially lethal.

Soon after Metcalfe and Mama started to retreat, Rzucidlo and two Sherpas—all of whom, according to a June 2024 story in Outside, saw the initial slide and continued to ascend—triggered a second avalanche. They, like Gutu’s group, had cut across the precarious northeast face instead of sticking to the ridge. The debris thundered down to the right of the first avalanche’s path, piling up 100 meters away from where Gutu lay.

Four people died in all—Gutu and Mingmar and Rzucidlo and Tenjen “Lama” Sherpa. Two avalanche victims survived. While bringing one of them down the mountain, Mingma Gyalje Sherpa—aka Mingma G, the owner of Imagine Nepal, the local outfitter Metcalfe had hired to guide her to the top—fell and fractured his skull. Rzucidlo’s and Lama’s bodies have not been found.

Metcalfe didn’t hear about the second avalanche, the one that killed her friend, until about an hour later, when she was on her way back to Camp 3. The tragedy quickly made international headlines. It also drew condemnation from the climbing community: A pair of Western women had not only compromised their own safety in pursuit of a title, but two Sherpas had died supporting their duel. “That’s what was so excruciating to me,” says Ellen Miller, Metcalfe’s mentor in Vail and the first American woman to climb Mt. Everest from the north (in 2001) and south (2002) sides. “Back in my day, we all just felt lucky to get up there and get down alive. Record-chasing has changed the energy on the mountain.”

“If there was no competition,” Mingma G says, “we all would have followed the fixed line.”

Mountaineering has delivered both glory and tragedy for more than a century, most famously with the decades-long pursuit of the first ascent of Mt. Everest, ultimately claimed by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953. The inherent danger of such quests tempered the degree to which climbers challenged one another on the peaks—survival exacted a high enough cost on its own. The first major “race” that incited significant media coverage unfolded over a period of years, not months, when Italy’s Reinhold Messner and Poland’s Jerzy Kukuczka vied to be the first to climb every eight-thousander. Messner summited his initial eight-thousander in 1970 and took the title in 1986. (Guinness World Records later revoked his claim on a technicality, when it was discovered that Messner began his descent just shy of the true summit of Annapurna.)

The rise of commercial expeditions in the 1990s expanded the sport, but most paying clients headed to Everest, a summit that is less technical than other eight-thousanders but carries singular prestige. The peak became its own industry, injecting millions into Nepal’s economy and opening the door to climbers with a modicum of the experience possessed by the self-sufficient old guard. The pressure on guides to put paying clients on top and the fame those customers sought gradually tainted the purity of the endeavor. In many cases, it also led to significant loss of life, such as in May 1996, when a storm killed eight guides and clients on Everest.

Still, demand continued to grow, eventually extending beyond Everest. Over the past decade, the logistical efficiency of commercial expeditions has expanded to other 8,000-meter peaks. Operators fixed ropes to the summits and realized they no longer needed to spend weeks acclimatizing. Nutritional supplements improved, clothing got warmer, and ice axes and crampons got lighter. The process was streamlined, and, not surprisingly, word spread. Social media influencers started showing up in base camps. Metcalfe says she saw commercial clients who didn’t know how to put on their crampons.
The changes impacted the pursuit of records, too. Suddenly, any person with the means could finish the 14 in a fraction of the time it used to take legends. Gutu, for instance, summited her first eight-thousander only about a year before she tried for her last.

Metcalfe grew up in Los Angeles. Her father worked as a chief financial officer for public companies; her mother was a homemaker. After graduating high school in 1992, Metcalfe spent a year ski-bumming in Breckenridge, where she delivered pizza and cleaned houses while competing in mogul events.

She bagged her first fourteeners—Lincoln, Bross, and Democrat in Park County—in 1993. She added to her list casually, through undergrad at Colorado College, while working as a cancer researcher in Denver, and during medical school at the University of Colorado. After the easy peaks, she pursued more technical ones, despite a crippling fear of heights. “It was mostly about proving to myself that I could do something hard and uncomfortable,” she says. Soon, she was shimmying along the Knife Edge on Capitol and clambering up Pyramid’s airy ledges. Before climbs, Metcalfe would swallow a quarter-tablet of Ativan, a benzodiazepine that works like a sedative, to manage her acrophobia; later, she tried eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), a form of psychotherapy that helps process trauma. “I used to think my fear was horrible, and I was ashamed when I had it,” Metcalfe says. “EMDR taught me to make friends with it. If you need to, talk to it. Say, ‘Hey, I appreciate that you’re trying to help me, but right now you’re not helping me. So I’m gonna put you in this box’ ”—a fictional compartment in her mind, where it stayed until the climb was over.

In 2012, Metcalfe summited Denali, North America’s highest peak, while volunteering as an expedition doctor for the National Park Service. She returned to Alaska in 2013, the same summer she finished climbing Colorado’s fourteeners (excepting Culebra, which is on private property). Soon after, she told her father, “I need bigger mountains.” Miller, her mentor, introduced her to famed Everest guide Russell Brice, who offered Metcalfe a job as a base-camp physician in Nepal starting in 2014. The unique arrangement—she often climbed for free instead of taking a wage—gained her entry into Himalayan mountaineering.

While working as an expedition doc in May 2016, Metcalfe summited Everest, running out of oxygen during the descent and surviving a stumble that left her dangling over air from the fixed line. She improved her technical climbing skills, and in 2019—no longer doubling as the base-camp physician—she took her second shot at 27,838-foot Makalu, a significantly steeper challenge than Everest. Before leaving for Nepal, Metcalfe wrote her parents a letter, imploring them not to recover her body if something happened.

Metcalfe was aware that no American woman had climbed the eight-thousanders. After summiting Makalu, she decided she would try to top the eight in Nepal. After that, all 14. “Being first wasn’t the goal,” she says. “This is horrible self-talk that I work on, but I kept thinking somebody who’s a ‘real’ climber would come along. I didn’t want to fight for it. I just wanted to finish the project.”

Pursuit of the eight-thousanders had killed many a standout mountaineer, history that Metcalfe came to know well. She read about women like Wanda Rutkiewicz, a Pole who was the first woman to climb K2. Rutkiewicz led her own expeditions and knocked off eight 8,000-meter peaks in 14 years before disappearing on Kangchenjunga in 1992, at age 49. Metcalfe reserved special admiration for Spain’s Edurne Pasaban and Austria’s Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, who climbed in a style similar to Rutkiewicz’s—without supplemental oxygen or guides—and were the first women to complete the eight-thousanders, in 2010 and 2011, respectively. “I look up to them as goddesses,” Metcalfe says.

Metcalfe is quick to acknowledge that her style does not compare with theirs: She pays outfitters to keep her safe and transport her gear up and down the mountain, and she uses oxygen—factors that significantly ease the burden. But they don’t eliminate it. In April 2021, while descending 26,545-foot Annapurna, Metcalfe and her team ran out of oxygen in the death zone. She struggled to complete basic tasks, like clipping onto a rope. After a couple of hours, she swallowed a pill of dexamethasone, a steroid many physicians consider the last resort during hypoxia. Some Spanish-speaking guides call it levanta muertos, because it brings a dead person to life. Her outfitter eventually purchased an extra bottle of oxygen from a Russian team, but Metcalfe’s safe return didn’t quell the doubt that had begun to boil. “I pushed way past where I should have,” she recalls. “I took a while to think: Do I even belong on these peaks?”

The next year marked a turning point. She’d summited four of the eight-thousanders, but her knees ached from decades of skiing and climbing; an orthopedist told her she had the joints of an 80-year-old. Not only was she exhausted from working at a hospital during the pandemic, but she’d also become dependent on opioids following her 2014 hip replacement, a situation that threatened her medical career. In early 2022, she left her job, having already agreed to cease practicing until an independent group of doctors could assess the severity of her case and suggest a course of action. She took weekly drug tests to document her sobriety and attended 12-step meetings.

She felt like her identity was in doubt. “Not being able to practice medicine, I think I had lost a lot of self-esteem and felt shame to my family and friends,” Metcalfe says. “I was in a dark place, had made mistakes, and was searching for something to hold onto that would give me purpose. This is what climbing provided.” So, she went all in: She dipped into her 401(k) and committed to finishing her final 10 eight-thousanders by 2024, when she would be 50.

Metcalfe returned to Nepal in March 2022, summiting Dhaulagiri then moving on to Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-tallest peak. There, Metcalfe suffered frostbite on four of her toes, and she and her team almost ran out of oxygen. Forced to turn back, she began to hallucinate during the descent, seeing figures she believed were Indian pilgrims transported to the mountain by bus. She turned to her climbing partner, Chris Warner, a former Everest guide based in Aspen who became the second American man to summit all 14 eight-thousanders. “Did you see those tourists over there?” she asked him. Convinced her expedition was over due to the frostbite, Metcalfe took a helicopter to Kathmandu. A week later, at the prodding of Mingma G, Metcalfe returned to Kangchenjunga and hobbled to the summit.

Of the eight peaks remaining, five were in Pakistan, which her parents pleaded with her to avoid, fearing the country’s past violence. In 2013, terrorists massacred 11 people in the base camp of Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-tallest mountain. “Whatever you do, you’re never going to climb in Pakistan, are you?” her father asked. She assured them she was only trying to climb the eight-thousanders in Nepal, concealing her dream.

“Finally, I was like, ‘All right, Tracee, just tell them what you’re doing,’  ” she remembers, “ ‘because it’s going to kill you if you don’t.’ ” She confessed her intentions and, in June 2023, flew to Islamabad. On 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, a fang of rock and ice known as “the killer mountain,” Metcalfe fought through a crippling gastrointestinal illness high on the peak and summited. She stepped over a pair of frozen bodies on K2 later that month; after topping out, a gust of wind ripped one of Metcalfe’s contact lenses from her eye, with thousands of feet still to descend. That fall, she summited 26,781-foot Manaslu, her ninth eight-thousander, in Nepal. She then proceeded to Tibet, where she joined dozens of others, including Gutu and Rzucidlo, for the attempt on Shishapangma.

Metcalfe ruminated on the 2023 tragedy for months: what caused it, what could have been done differently, and what it meant for her quest moving forward. “Maybe that’s just me compartmentalizing it so that I could justify climbing again,” she says. “But in my mind, I was like, I think we can come back to this mountain and make better decisions.” After summiting three peaks in 2023 and suddenly becoming the closest American woman to finishing, she committed to attempting her last five in 2024, culminating with a return to Shishapangma in October.

Ellen Miller says she observed a change in Metcalfe’s motivation. Metcalfe insists she simply wanted to resume the rest of her life—powder skiing with friends, not having to train all the time. “I would say 10 to 20 percent was about being first,” Metcalfe says. “Mostly, it was about being done. I thought it would be cool to contain it to a decade and see if I could do five in a year at age 50.”

Metcalfe had never been sponsored nor made much of an attempt to document her climbs. But before returning to Asia, she pitched herself to backers for the first time. She built a website touting her 8,000-meter summits and made her private Instagram account public. Aside from an $8,000 contribution by her hip surgeon, however, no one bit. “I’m just going to be really honest with you,” one vice president of marketing told her. “You need to have a minimum of 10,000 followers, and you’re too old.”

At the same time, a new woman had emerged as a contender for the American record, and she was everything Metcalfe was not. Nikol Kovalchuk, a fitness model and the wife of NHL star Ilya Kovalchuk, was an influencer with 208,000 Instagram followers. Metcalfe had around 1,000. Eight days after Metcalfe topped out on Lhotse in May 2024, Kovalchuk did the same, taking the edge, 11 peaks to 10. (Kovalchuk did not respond to 5280’s requests for comment.)

Metcalfe had seen the tug of the record and its heartbreaking fallout, and she refused to repeat the cycle. When people asked what she would do if it came down to Shishapangma again, with her and Kovalchuk tied at 13, she replied: “I’m just gonna walk up to her and say, ‘We need to do this together. We need to show the world, first of all, this doesn’t matter. And we’re gonna do the opposite.’ ”

Metcalfe summited Gasherbrum 2 on July 22, then Gasherbrum 1, both in Pakistan, 11 days later. When she returned to base camp, her gear was wet, and her legs felt wobbly. To remain on schedule, however, she had to wake up at 6 a.m. and march 10 hours to the base of Broad Peak. “I knew if I didn’t do Broad, I wouldn’t be the first,” Metcalfe says. “But I really, genuinely was like, You know what? It’s OK. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. I just have to trust the universe.”

Metcalfe and two Sherpas topped out on Broad on August 8—her third eight-thousander in 17 days. When she walked into base camp afterward, “her body was shaking,” Mingma G recalls. “Almost no control on her feet. She looked very weak.”

Back at Shishapangma a month and a half later, however, Metcalfe felt restored. Kovalchuk was there, too, but Metcalfe had reclaimed the lead, 13 to 12. As long as she summited, the record would be hers. She worried about climbing past where the quartet had died, but she knew the technical challenge was manageable. “It felt like the hard ones were done,” she says. Rzucidlo’s sister, Angela Terry, sent a note of encouragement that Metcalfe read while traveling to the mountain. “Although we have never met, my family and I wanted to send our best wishes to you! If you are in Tibet and going for Shishapangma stay safe! We are rooting for you!”

On the afternoon of October 4, Metcalfe and a cadre of climbers from six countries—a half-dozen of whom were finishing their 14-peak projects—navigated an airy ridge to the front-porch-size summit, careful to avoid the corniced rim.

“Tracee! Congratulations,” said Mingma G as Metcalfe took her last few steps.

“Congratulations,” she replied, removing her oxygen mask. “Now what? How do we get down?”

He laughed. She wheezed. Their track glinted in the background. “Tracee’s scared,” Metcalfe said. Another step. “Tracee’s drained.”

Sirbaz Khan, who had just become the first Pakistani to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, grabbed her arm and shook her. “Come on! Be happy, Tracee!” he said. She grinned nervously. “You’re right,” she replied.

The next day, she received a text in base camp that read, in part, “I am so happy that you claimed first American woman. I’m sure Gina was cheering you on. She spoke highly of you.” It was from Rzucidlo’s mom.

Suddenly, the weight of her achievement hit like a block of ice. Metcalfe began to weep.

Two and a half weeks after her summit, I pull into Metcalfe’s driveway in West Vail, where she lives in a townhome. Other than a couple of mentions on climbing blogs, her achievement had attracted little attention—not even a story in her hometown paper, the Vail Daily—though she did gain 20 Instagram followers. Metcalfe makes it clear during our drive to the Pitkin Creek trailhead, where we will hike into the snowy Gore Range, that the lack of attention doesn’t bother her, even if she finds it curious. The criticism she’s received? That’s a different story.

On the same day Metcalfe summited Shishapangma, well-known mountaineering blogger Alan Arnette, who is also based in Colorado, published a Himalayan recap. “The 2024 autumn climbing season,” he wrote, “reveals just how routine making the summit of an 8000-meter peak has become in the 2020s.” Some took it as a swipe at Metcalfe’s record. Cathy Cohn, Metcalfe’s best friend of 30 years, questioned Arnette on Facebook. He defended his stance in a reply: “While noteworthy for the individual, it’s no longer newsworthy in my view and is now similar to summiting peaks like Denali or [Argentina’s] Aconcagua”—mountains that stand 1,810 and 1,040 meters lower than 8,000 meters, respectively.

Metcalfe has heard similar opinions levied behind her back for years. “I get that I’m not a badass alpinist, and I’ve never pretended to be,” she says. “So why do you have to shit on me?” Metcalfe, who spent $350,000 on her expeditions, doesn’t dispute that her style is less impressive than Kaltenbrunner’s and Pasaban’s. But equaling their feats was never the point. “I am really proud of myself for doing this,” she says.

“People can criticize her all they want for her, whatever, style,” Miller says. “But putting one foot in front of the other up there is no joke. And frostbite is no joke. Altitude, snow blindness, digestive issues above 25,000 feet—the general public just has no idea how difficult it is.”

Tragedies notwithstanding, one could find plenty of meaning in the fact that Metcalfe holds the title. Slow and steady won, at a time in mountaineering when it pays to sprint. “I think it’s the way it’s supposed to be,” says Warner, her climbing partner, who knew both Rzucidlo and Gutu and laments how the race corrupted their approach. “There’s an old saying: ‘Don’t reach the peak but miss the point.’ The point is, Why are you there? You’re there to become the best version of yourself. I think Tracee didn’t miss the point at all.”

Metcalfe and I sit on our packs in a clearing below Pitkin Lake, chomping on pineapple chunks in the sun. She says she hasn’t used opioids for years but still attends local 12-step meetings and logs in to virtual sessions for health care workers who have struggled with substance abuse. “They give me a lot of strength,” she says. She takes Naproxen to numb the pain in her knee, which will be replaced a few weeks after our walk. Her goal is to recover in time for the Leadville 100 mountain bike race next summer. Someday, she hopes to summit an eight-thousander without supplemental oxygen.

For now, she’s trying to enjoy her accomplishment and assess what it means. “It felt like a validation that I do have worth, and I could follow through on things,” she says. “I wasn’t just someone defined by their mistakes.”

We finish our snack and begin the 3,000-foot descent. Metcalfe takes the lead, limping down the slushy, rugged trail using a ski pole as a crutch due to her knee pain. She stops. “You go first,” she says. “I’ll actually be faster if I’m following.”

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