New Heart Helped Woman Reach New Peaks

Like any mountaineer, Kelly Perkins depends on an abundance of heart and nerve to reach a summit.

What sets her apart is that the heart she relies on isn't her own.

Since receiving a heart transplant in 1995, Perkins has climbed several of the world's most challenging peaks, from the Matterhorn in Switzerland to El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in California.

Beginning on Wednesday, Perkins hopes to summit 10 peaks in Wyoming's Teton Range - all for a purpose loftier than the tallest of those, the 13,776-foot Grand Teton.

"I want to be out there showing people that you can have a life post-transplant," said the 47-year-old from Laguna Niguel, Calif. "If people know that, perhaps they'll be more willing to sign up to be an organ donor."

Five cardiac rehabilitation nurses from Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls will accompany Perkins when she climbs Grand Teton. The nurses aren't going along in case she needs help, but because they want to support her cause and learn more about how she does what she does.

Already the nurses - only one of whom has climbed a mountain before - say they feel inspired.

"Someone said to her - I think it was Katie Couric - she doesn't know the meaning of the word 'impossible.' That pretty much sums it up," said one nurse, Mary Duncan.

Other heart recipients have climbed mountains before, but Perkins is "unparalleled" in her post-transplant mountaineering, said Joel Newman, spokesman for the United Network for Organ Sharing based in Richmond, Va.

The 5-foot-2, 100-pound Perkins was an active woman who loved the outdoors before she became ill with a racing heartbeat following a trip to the Swiss Alps in 1992. Doctors determined that a virus had infected her heart. She was 30.

For three years she lived with a device implanted in her chest that would shock her heart back into a normal rhythm whenever it raced too fast. Then in November 1995, Perkins got a new heart from a woman in her 40s who died in a fall from a horse.

What Perkins didn't know until after getting her new heart was that doctors can't hook up the nerves of an old heart to a new one. That means her new heart doesn't immediately recognize when her muscles need more oxygen, causing a lag time before it adjusts to the demands of exercise.

"At first, I was terrified, because I was like, 'Oh my god, they put in the wrong heart,"' she recalled. "I really thought that they made a mistake in the operating room and they just put the bad heart in again. I was just out of breath."

Then she got to know her heart and learned how to regulate her activity accordingly.

Her first summit after her transplant was a hike to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite in 1996. She followed up the next year by hiking up Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states.

In 1998, Perkins hiked to the top of Mount Fuji in Japan, bringing with her the ashes of the woman whose heart she carries in her chest.

Perkins has since completed ever-more-challenging hikes and technical climbs: Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro in 2001, the Matterhorn in 2003, New Zealand's Mount Rolling Pin in 2005, El Capitan in 2005, Argentina's Cajon de Arenales in 2007, and last year, the face of Half Dome.

Her husband, Craig Perkins, accompanied her every time.

"She is really just self-motivated," he said. "But also I think that she has this mentality that, 'I want to live and I want to live now, and I want to take advantage of being healthy."'

Ashtanga yoga, hiking and occasional climbing all keep her in shape. All the while, she said, she keeps in tune with her body - a necessity of life she doesn't really mind.

"As long as I know I'm not in danger and that I just need to modify my behavior, I think it's really interesting," said Perkins, who is a motivational speaker.

Starting Wednesday, she and her husband will attempt the Grand Traverse, a route that ascends five major and five minor peaks in the Tetons and involves 19,000 feet in elevation gain and loss.

The plan is to climb Teewinot Mountain (12,325 feet) and Mount Owen (12,928 feet) on the first day, said Mark Newcomb, a co-owner of Jackson-based Exum Mountain Guides who helped organize the climb.

Thursday will be relatively restful - a fairly short hike to the Lower Saddle between Middle Teton (12,804 feet) and Grand Teton, where the Perkinses and their Exum guide will meet the cardiac rehabilitation nurses.

The group will climb Grand Teton together on Friday morning. The Perkinses will then tackle Middle Teton that afternoon and wrap up on Saturday by climbing South Teton (12,514 feet) and five smaller peaks: the Ice Cream Cone, Gilkey Tower, Spalding Peak, Cloudveil Dome and Nez Perce Peak.

"It's truly a spectacular climb and it involves a lot of technical climbing along with a lot of scrambling," Newcomb said of the Grand Traverse. "And it involves a lot of camping out in high alpine places."

The number of peaks involved might make this look like her toughest trek yet, but Perkins said that's not necessarily going to be the case.

"I approach them all as though they're going to be my most challenging," she said. "Because the mountain, it almost always seems to have the final say."

She's living the life she wanted to regain so badly when her health was at its worst.

"I believed in that and it happened maybe because I had that sense of hope," she said. "I think that's really important."