Last October, longtime Vail resident Tracee Metcalfe became the first American woman to climb all 14 of the world’s vaunted 8,000-meter peaks, scattered across the Himalayan Range in Asia. Maybe you heard about her feat. More likely you didn’t. That’s because Metcalfe’s coveted “first” came in the shadow of tragedy and with little fanfare. The prior year, while she was ascending 26,335-foot Shishapangma in Tibet, four climbers on the peak perished in two separate avalanches. The victims included American women Gina Rzucidlo and Anna Gutu, who were gunning for the same distinction Metcalfe would claim in 2024, at age 50.

Metcalfe’s achievement culminated with five “8,000er” summits in one year, a sequence that would have been unheard of a generation ago. She had worked up to such lofty goals locally by ascending the 10 highest peaks in the Gore Range—mostly solo—as well as all of Colorado’s famous Fourteeners (save for Culebra, which sits on private land). Metcalfe, an internal medicine doctor, self-funded her Himalayan expeditions and climbed with guides and supplemental oxygen. Here, she describes the ups and downs of a historic, if little-known, career on the roof of the world.

I didn’t grow up in an athletic family. I played a little volleyball in grade school in Southern California, then I started skiing with my dad when I was 13. I got into mogul skiing and moved to Breckenridge in 1992 after graduating high school. I was a ski bum: I delivered pizzas for Domino’s, which let me ski all day, eat all the pizza I wanted, then be done around 10:30. I did a little housekeeping too, cleaning up construction sites before the owners moved in.

I climbed my first Fourteeners in 1993. I’m afraid of heights, but I get satisfaction from doing something outside of my comfort zone—proving to myself that I can. Once, when I completed the exposed Blanca-Little Bear traverse [a narrow mile-long ridge between Colorado’s Blanca and Little Bear peaks] with a friend, he was like, “This is so awesome! Aren’t you having fun?” I was completely silent, just like, “I need you to stop talking.” It’s stressful for me, but I’ve learned to live with my fear. I did EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing] for six months to help me work through it.

I got into high-altitude mountaineering by working as an expedition doctor on Denali and then on Mount Everest, which I climbed in 2016, two years after I got a hip replacement. Ellen Miller [a Vail high-altitude pioneer and Metcalfe’s mentor] was definitely an inspiration to me. She has two artificial hips, and when I got mine, I was like, this is not going to stop me from doing hard stuff. We call each other Everest Hipster Sisters.

Climbing in the Death Zone is very hard on your body and mind. Pulmonologists compare the lack of oxygen to being critically ill in the ICU. You’re not thinking right. You’re not sleeping. You’re hardly eating. At base camp, after some of our summits, we had word-finding difficulty. I’d be like, “The thing that cuts things...oh, the knife. Can you pass me the knife?” On Gasherbrum 1 in Pakistan, we were coming down on oxygen, and I was convinced that we were on Mt. Rainier or some volcano in the summer, and there was a lodge, and I kept talking to the sherpas, “Well, can’t we just go that way? It’s going to be faster to get to the lodge.” And one of them just got this angry look on his face and kicked the snow. He was like, “You’re talking crazy!” I was able to reel it in, but in my mind I kept having to remind myself it wasn’t real.

During my quest I tried to be really clear with my family about the dangers. My dad made me get my will in order before I climbed Makalu in 2019. I sent my parents an email that basically said, If I die on the mountain, just leave me there. Do not bring me down. I don’t want there to be any discussion.

Sometimes I had to step over dead people while climbing. On Kangchenjunga, there was a climber who’d died two days before, so his body was literally right in the trail. Our sherpa team, they don’t like dead bodies, so they took an extra 40 minutes to reroute where the rope was going. Then there was another one close to the summit. We didn’t have to touch him to get around, but it was really upsetting to see how well preserved his body was and how close to the top. I kept ruminating, how did he die? It doesn’t look like he fell, and he doesn’t look that old. On K2 the bodies were exposed, skin and everything.

Annapurna was the hardest peak for me. I ran out of oxygen, food, and water on summit day, which took around 20 hours. The longest summit push was on G1 in Pakistan—roughly 30 hours.

Even though I self-funded my trips, I did try to get sponsors going into the final year. But they completely blew me off: “You don’t have enough followers, you’re not young enough.” After that I was like, I don’t want to pander.

Before returning to Shishapangma in 2024 to finish the project [as a paying client on an expedition led by a Nepali guiding company], I was nervous due to what happened the previous fall. Gina [Rzucidlo] was my friend; we’d met on Annapurna in 2021. In my mind, I felt like: We made a lot of bad decisions, and climbing is dangerous; there’s no way there’s not going to be risk involved. But I think we can come back to this mountain and make better decisions.

Topping out was a magical thing. I don’t know how you even put it into words.