Holland native makes history as first woman to climb Seven Second Summits

HOLLAND — A Holland native and Hope College graduate set a world record last month when she completed hiking the second-highest peak on each continent.

Jenn Drummond, currently a Utah resident, finished the Seven Second Summits challenge on June 1, when she hiked Mount Logan in Canada’s Yukon, near the border with Alaska. She's the first woman to ever complete the challenge.

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“I took the deepest breath I possibly could in, and in that moment, everything stood still,” Drummond said. “Like time, distance, space — and just, I was in awe of how magic life truly is.”

Drummond, a mother of seven, told WOOD TV-8 she never thought she'd compete on such a grand scale. But when her car flipped three times on a highway in Utah in December 2018, and she walked away with her life, she saw things differently.

Drummond’s car was struck by a semi, causing it to flip and crash into the median. Doctors told her that “99 times out of 100,” a crash like that is fatal. Instead, Drummond survived and avoided serious injury. She was able to spend Christmas at home with her family just a week later.

“It woke me up to the fact that we do not get to choose when we leave this world, but we sure get to choose how we live it,” she said.

She said, immediately following the crash, she closed her eyes and tuned into her body.

“I closed my eyes and I could wiggle my fingers and toes and I go, ‘I can feel my fingers and toes; I’m OK,’” she said. “And I still use that to this day.”

Drummond has trained whenever and wherever possible. She said that, while most of her fellow climbers can dedicate upwards of eight hours to training each day, she's had to fit practices in between her kids’ schoolwork and soccer games.

“I had a tent that I slept in that I put on top of my bed that mimicked the lack of oxygen in the environments, so that allowed my body to acclimate quite a bit at home before going to the mountains,” she said.

Many of the summits Drummond completed included straight hikes, rock climbing or scaling faces. She said her first attempts at Mount Logan and K2 (between Pakistan and China) ended before they hit the peak, due to poor weather conditions and other difficult challenges.

“(K2 is) a very avalanche-prone mountain based on its steepness and a teammate on our team died in an avalanche,” Drummond said.

While the tragedy wasn't lost on Drummond and her team, it also reminded her of her own brush with death. She persevered and completed both of the final two peaks, K2 and Mount Logan, on her second attempt.

“Anytime I’m feeling overwhelmed on the mountains or anywhere, I close down my brain and I just connect to my body and I wiggle my fingers and toes,” she said. “And I know I’m OK.”

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Although Drummond set a world record with her ascents, she told The Sentinel last year the journey was about more than that. Drummond hopes to inspire people, particularly mothers, proving they can raise a family without putting their own ambitions on the back burner.

“Before that car accident, I was teaching my kids to put themselves second by my own example," she said in August. "They have a purpose here and their purpose is to live their lives out [to the fullest]. I don't ever want them to put themselves second, so I changed my entire philosophy to say, 'I'm doing me and you, not you instead of me.'”

— The Holland Sentinel contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Holland native makes history as first woman to climb Seven Second Summits