Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601
608-791-5295

https://www.fscenter.org

Steve Spilde: Welcome. My guest today is Wendy Mitch. This is weird, because I consider you
a friend. I’ve known you for a couple of years. We visit on a regular basis. But the irony is I
have never actually met you. We’ve never been in the same room together, and yet I feel like
you’re a friend because this relationship began with a class at the Franciscan Spirituality Center.
We met, started having future conversations, [and we] continued to have conversations [and]
kind of hit it off. And yet we live in this new world where we’ve never actually been together
before. Welcome, Wendy.
Wendy Mitch: It is very odd, and it’s even odd for you to be welcoming me because it’s so
familiar. It will be fun to finally meet you.
Steve: That’s coming up in March. You’re doing a presentation a weekend for the Spirituality
Center, “An Integral Approach to Spiritual Development.” That will happen March 11 th and 12 th ,
[and] we’ll talk about that in a bit. But I’m looking forward to that day when we can say, “Hey.”
One of the things I appreciate about you is your energy. Our energy levels are very different.
You’re the sort of person that finishes your workout at the gym at 5 a.m., and at 5 a.m. I’m still a
couple hours from waking up.
Wendy: There are many people like you, that is true.
Steve: My challenge of the winter is to just get through it and survive [and reach the point
where I can say], “Oh, my goodness, I’m excited because it’s April and I didn’t die during the
winter.” Your winter challenge is going to Africa and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
Wendy: It’s not something I recommend to everybody, that’s for sure.
Steve: You just got back. Tell me about that.
Wendy: A friend of mine does these sorts of these crazy expeditions. She has climbed Mount
Fuji, Machu Pichu, Mount Baker, and she was doing this while I still had kids at home. I often
said to her, “When my kids are gone, I want to go on one of these excursions.” So a year and a
half ago, she said, “You want to hike Kilimanjaro with me?” I said, “Where is that? Is that in
Wisconsin? Is that right near Mount La Crosse [or] Granite Peak?” I had no idea it was in
Africa, it was in Tanzania – I knew nothing. In my naivete, I said, “Sure, why not?” We were
supposed to go last year, but COVID derailed that. So this year we went. We had 12 climbers –
10 were from the United States, two were from Spain. Nine of us summited. It was the most
challenging physically, mentally experience of my life. [It took] six days getting up Kilimanjaro,
which is 19,340 feet in the air – it’s one of the seven summits – and then two days to get down. I
don’t want to say too much about it, but the summit day was a 6½-hour climb, from 15,000 [feet]
to 19,000. I just did everything I could to stay alive – just put one foot in front of the other.
Steve: Which would be hard under the best of circumstances. But you were doing it in the

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middle of a blizzard ice storm [and] subzero windchill. You actually could have died if things
had gone bad.
Wendy: Yeah, they were bad, and our guides were watching us like hawks. There were about a
half-dozen times where I thought, “This can all be over if I just curled up under that boulder and
just shut my eyes.” We left at midnight, so we were kind of exhausted when we started. But the
exhaustion, the ice blizzard pelting my face, 40- to 50-mile-per-hour winds that just blew me
over sometimes … A lot of us would just kind of get blown over – not where we’d fall, but we’d
trip – and the temperatures just being relentless. It was a 6½-hour climb of relentless attack from
Mother Nature. It’s the only way I can describe it; it just wouldn’t let up on us. But yeah, we
made the summit, and I was just so happy to be alive. Then I knew I didn’t have to go uphill
anymore; I could just go down, which presents its own challenges with toes and knees and
slipping because it was still an ice blizzard. I always say, go big or go home. I don’t really do
things on a small scale.