Chief executive officer’s charity benefits from her scaling Seven Summits
Julie McKelvey and members of her team make their way up Vinson Massif.
Julie McKelvey
Julie McKelvey displays her Summit for Sound banner on top of Vinson Massif.
Julie McKelvey stands at the top of Vinson Massif, which lies within the Sentinel Range of the Ellsworth Mountains in Antarctica.
The Seven Summits are the highest mountains of each of the seven traditional continents.
As of Christmas Day, Julie McKelvey was on her way to Antarctica.
Keep in mind that winter in the Northern Hemisphere is the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, and the sole feasible time for visiting earth’s most desolate continent spans just six weeks, pretty much coinciding with the holiday season.
And the weather still is almost inconceivably cold.
“We were in minus-40 temperatures most of the time,” McKelvey said. “Everybody asks, how do you deal with that? You have all the right clothing, layering and equipment.”
All of that is necessary for anyone attempting to do what she accomplished: scale Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica at an elevation of 16,067 feet.
For McKelvey – a Miracle-Ear Franchise owner with 34 offices across Pennsylvania, including one in Bethel Park – the adventure represented her fourth successful climb on the way to conquering the tallest peaks on each of the continents, known as the Seven Summits.
Along with becoming one of fewer than 100 women worldwide to claim the achievement, she so far has raised more than $150,000 through the climbs to benefit Summit for Sound, the philanthropy she started to support the Miracle-Ear Foundation’s Gift of Sound, which provides free hearing aids for people who need them.
“What I’m trying to do, also, is spread the word about what we do, because a lot of people just think, I need hearing aids. I can’t afford them,” she said. “And then they don’t even look.”
A resident of suburban Harrisburg, McKelvey got her start climbing mountains six years ago. Her father, John Beall, had scaled two of the Seven Summits, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa, and Mount Elbrus in the European part of Russia.
“He said to me out of the blue one day, ‘I think I have one more mountain left, and I’d love for you to do it with me,'” McKelvey recalled. “I had never climbed anything. I didn’t even know what was involved.”
Nevertheless, she and son Jacob, 12 at the time, joined Beall in traveling to the island of Honshu in Japan, home of 12,389-foot Mount Fuji.
“You get up to this hut, which is maybe at about 11,000 feet, and you stay overnight,” McKelvey said. “The guide got me up about four in the morning to get ready, and I went outside and was above the clouds and the sun’s rising. It just brought me to tears, the whole experience of being up there that high and watching the sun rise.”
Thusly enlightened, she decided tackle the big seven, starting with the 19,341 feet of Kilimanjaro. Then came Elbrus, near Russia’s border with Georgia, at 18,510 feet.
In early 2020, she journeyed to western Argentina and Mount Aconcagua. At 22,837 feet, the Andes peak is the highest in the world outside of Asia.
“A scary thing happened at the summit, and I got sick,” she said. “It was a necessary thing for me to experience, because it’s dangerous. People die on these mountains, and you have to be with the right people and know what you’re doing.”
Her next Seven Summits climb was scheduled for last June: Alaska’s Denali, standing 20,310 feet as North America’s tallest.
“I took a really bad fall on my last training hike, a week before I went there,” she recalled. “And I did not have it X-rayed, because I didn’t want to know.”
Despite being in pain, she had made it partially up Denali before her guide noticed she was injured and sent her home.
“It was really hard. I was really angry,” she said. “But then I got home and had it X-rayed, and it was broken. My foot was broken the entire time, and I didn’t know it. So I would have never made it. Nobody can get up there with a broken foot.”
Denali, in fact, presents a particularly grueling challenge for climbers.
“You have to carry over a hundred pounds of gear. There are no porters, no sherpas. There’s nobody to carry your stuff,” McKelvey said. “So I’m carrying a 70-pound backpack and another 50 pounds dragging a sled behind me. You take all the food, all the gear, all the tents, all your personal stuff that you need to survive for three weeks.”
She is giving Denali another shot in the spring. And in 2023 comes Mount Everest, which as of December 2020 had “grown” to an official elevation of 29,031.7 feet, according to what then were the latest calculations.
That will cover six of the Seven Summits, leaving the 16,024-foot Carstensz Pyramid in the Papua Province of Indonesia as the final peak. McKelvey plans to scale it either shortly before or after Everest.
In the meantime, she is resuming a strenuous preparatory regimen after relaxing a bit when she returned home from Antarctica.
“The training is six days a week,” she said, including two days of working with her strength coach in a gym.
For work on her climbing, she heads to Hawk Rock, overlooking the Susquehanna River near Duncannon, Perry County.
“There are two days on the mountain, one short day with a really heavy pack and one long day with a light pack. And then the other two days are running, usually, just getting my endurance up,” McKelvey said. “It’s almost a full-time job doing this.”
Regarding her actual job as chief executive officer of a widely ranging business, the Indiana University of Pennsylvania graduate said that her alpine pursuits have helped teach her how to delegate and put the proper people in place.
“They’re doing amazing,” she reported. “The company is actually growing while I’m doing this and while I’m away as much as I am.”
Her husband, Bobby, takes care of matters at home with their sons. Jacob now is 18 and a high school senior, and brother Jackson just turned 13.
“What’s happened with the kids is pretty cool. They’re so inspired by it, and especially my youngest. He writes me letters for each camp, and he seals them and gives them to me before I leave,” McKelvey said. “I’ll open them, and then I’m just crying because it’s all this inspirational stuff that he hears me talking about all the time, about ‘You can do this’ or ‘You’re stronger than you think you are.'”
That certainly applies to the circumstances surrounding her latest departure, on Dec. 23.
“That was hard, to be away from my family for the first time on Christmas,” she said. “But you only have this little window, and that’s when you go.”
For more information about the Miracle-Ear Foundation, visit www.miracle-ear.com/miracle-ear-foundation. Support Summit for Sound at pledge.giftofsound.org/campaign/summitforsound3-denali/c335157.