Isabel Supp&eacute; on a climbing wall, despite her foot injury.
Isabel Suppé on a climbing wall, despite her foot injury. (Courtesy Isabel Suppé, The Denver Post)

Who: Isabel Suppé of Boulder

The cause: Raising money for a foot bone transplant

The feat: To cycle from coast to coast

The story: In July 2010, the German-born Suppé was climbing an ice face in the Bolivian Andes with her friend, Peter Wiesenekker, when he slipped, causing both climbers to fall 1,100 feet to the bottom of the face. Miraculously, both of them survived but were severely injured. However, at 16,000 feet above sea level on an inaccessible mountain with extremely low temperatures and no means of communication, a broken foot with extreme blood loss can be a death sentence.

Seeing that Wiesenekker was in no condition to seek help, Supp knew that their only chance to survive was in her getting across the glacier, which meant dragging herself over the ice to send SOS signals to base camp. It took her two days to crawl over the glacier, but she made it, saving them both.

After 10 surgeries, doctors told Suppé she would not be able to return to high altitude — but since the accident, she became the first woman to solo-climb Nevado the Cachi, one of the highest and most solitary peaks in the Andes, and in July 2011, exactly one year after the accident, she and climber Robert Rauch opened a new vertical ice route in Bolivia, with Suppé on crutches.

Now Suppé hopes to cycle from the West Coast to the East Coast to raise funds for a highly complicated transplant surgery on the foot she shattered in the accident, so that she can walk and climb normally again.

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