The final
hours of Roxanne Vogel’s pursuit to summit the world’s tallest mountain in just
14 days total from door to door were akin to an episode of “The Amazing Race.”

The 14-day
time frame (a record door-to-door summit) was something Roxanne, nutrition and performance
research manager at GU Energy Labs, had been hyper-focused on for more than a
year, all while pushing her physical limits with intense mountain training,
strict nutrition plans and spending the better part of three months in hypoxic
environments to prepare. The idea was that if she was in peak health and
already acclimatized up to 20,000 feet, she could spend less time in base camp and
move quicker up the mountain.

“I got there
and I felt really good,” Roxanne said. “I was ready to hit the ground running.”

But training
can’t control Mother Nature, especially on a mountain with extreme and varying
weather conditions like Mount Everest. Despite being physically capable for the
ascent, Roxanne had to patiently wait for a safe weather window to summit. The
more she waited, though, the more she felt her goal slipping away.

“Most of the
time I was there, I didn’t think we were going to make the two weeks. We were
waiting on some weather issues,” she said. “By the time I did summit, I only
had a couple days to make it back home.”

That doesn’t
mean she didn’t relish the experience, and the views, however. Unlike many
Mount Everest experiences in 2019, Roxanne and her team had the summit
completely to themselves. Roxanne and her guide Lydia Brady, who’s summited
Everest five times and was the first woman to ever summit without oxygen, had
chosen a route up the north side from Tibet that only had been fixed with ropes
hours prior.

“We looked
down the mountain, to the south side even, and saw nobody. I was just like
‘Wow,’” she said.

And while
Roxanne was taking in her moment on top of the world, all of her friends,
family and fans back home were taking it in too. She was carrying an inReach
Explorer+ satellite communicator, so everyone could watch her journey up the
mountain. “Made it to the top, SUMMIT SUCCESS!!!” she wrote from her device.

She appreciated that everyone was able to view her MapShare and track her progress. 

“People were
so pumped about it,” she said. “It was a really big part of the project –
having people able to follow along. We even had it set up on a monitor here at
work so people could stop by and see where I was every day.”

The summit
isn’t the end of the journey though, and after an exhausting 16-hour summit
day, Roxanne had another task at hand: getting home to California in time to
meet her goal of 14 days. She only had a few days to descend the mountain and
meet a car waiting to drive her eight hours to the airport, then get aboard a
plane for the 30-hour journey home. In the end, she made it with one hour to
spare.

Any hiccup
could’ve narrowed her margins even more. The final day, Roxanne and her team
were supposed to stop for a refill of water at a camp on their way down. It
wasn’t there.

“We were
kind of lost and looking for the camp for awhile,” she said. “But then I pulled
out my inReach and was able to see that was absolutely where the camp had been
because I had dropped a pin there.”

With that
confirmation, the team continued down to base camp.

“If I hadn’t
known that camp was there for sure when we were standing right where it was
supposed to be, we could’ve been wandering around for god knows how long,” she
said. “It saved us.”

So it was with the break in the weather, an experienced partner, and a whole lot of training and preparation that Roxanne achieved her amazing race – Everest edition. And she already has big plans for the future … maybe back to the Himalayas, maybe to Antarctica, but certainly with an inReach in tow.

Read more about Roxanne’s “Lightning Ascent” at guenergy.com.

To access the Iridium satellite network for live tracking and messaging, including SOS capabilities, an active satellite subscription is required.
NOTICE: Some jurisdictions regulate or prohibit the use of satellite communications devices. It is the responsibility of the user to know and follow all applicable laws in the jurisdictions where the device is intended to be used.