Single mum of 7 who nearly died in car crash climbs Everest and smashes world record

Meet the single mum of seven whose close brush with death inspired her to climb seven mountains and smash a Guinness World Record.

Utah mum Jenn Drummond, 43, is lucky to be alive. She came out of a brutal car crash in 2018 miraculously unscathed, despite police rebuilding the incident 20 times and failing to find a scenario where she lived.

Jenn told Daily Express US: “I should have died….but I walked away pretty much unscathed. However, I kept getting a fever a few weeks later and we found out that the seatbelt had actually slashed a breast implant. The joke is I got a new car, new boobs and a new lease of life.”

Up until the traumatizing accident, Jenn says she felt stuck as she spent her days staying home in her Park City neighbourhood looking after her seven children, aged from 10 to 16, while running a financial services firm.

But she says the near-death experience taught her how short life is. That is when she decided to make a dramatic change.

Jenn told Daily Express US: “I am living a life that everybody tells me I should be living but I almost died and didn’t get to do all the things that I wanted to do. A lie that we tell ourselves is that we have all this time but we don’t get to choose how we died. We only choose how we live.”

The epiphany prompted Jenn to start training for a mountain climb. First on her list – Ama Dablam in Nepal.

But when her son dared her to climb Everest too, Jenn thought: “Why not?”

She later hired a coach and started training for Everest and Ama Dablam while home-schooling her children during the peak of the pandemic.

That same coach hit Jenn with another dare – become the first woman to climb the seven-second summits and get a Guinness World Record.

The challenge refers to climbing the second-highest summits on each of the world’s seven continents. 

Jenn said: “They are harder than the first seven, they have never been done by a woman, seven continents, sven mountains, seven kids…sounds like a jackpot. I said let’s try it”

Soon enough, Jenn was in Chile after it opened its borders during Covid to climb a mountain called Ojos Del Solado.

Jenn it was “so windy” when she got to the top that she “thought I was going to die”.

But that didn’t stop her from climbing six more, including the infamous Mount Everest.

Instead of being the terrifying beast Everest is pictured as in people’s minds, Jenn said climbing the mammoth mountain was “fun” and not as hard as one might think as it has been tackled so many times before, making paths easier to follow.  

“Every mountain had its own experience, every mountain had its own unique story”, Jenn said.

The most difficult ones were Mount Logan in Canada and Mount Tyree in Antarctica. Jenn and her climbing partner were forced to make “life or death” decisions with no ropes set up on the mountain.

“If one of us would have made a mistake we both would have suffered”, Jenn said.

But the scariest experience of all came while climbing K2, a 28,000-foot monster stretching across China and Pakistan

Jenn said: “We were training on a mountain nearby called Broad Peak..,I went off the mountain because I didn’t feel like it was safe based on how the team was running the expedition.

“They ended up running out of oxygen, people got stuck on the mountain, people lost their hands to frostbite…it was really bad. 

“When we came back down to summit K2…I was ahead of the team by a day because there wasn’t enough room for everybody to sleep in camp one so I had to go ahead. Then one of team mates got caught in an avalanche and died.

“I didn’t get to summit K2 that time because I went down to go and help my team and I just remember being that close to death, it was very scary. If I stayed with the team I could have been in that spot.”

Jenn has come knocking on death’s door several times throughout her life, but she always has her seven children in the back of her mind.

She said: “This is real. I need to make sure I am making smart decisions and being safe, and come home. Mountains will always be there.”

The single mom also said that she is not phased about parenting solo as it’s “better than having a partner that doesn’t support you”.