Meet This Record-Breaking Climber and Vail Synergy Wellness Founder
by Lisa Blake
On October 4, 2024, Dr. Tracee Metcalfe became the first U.S. woman to scale all of the world’s 8,000-meter (that’s 26,200 feet plus) peaks—a huge prize in alpine climbing.
At age 50, her fourteenth and final 8,000-meter summit climb brought her to the top of Tibet’s Shishapangma, the same peak that took the lives of two American women and two sherpa guides almost exactly one year prior.
From her home in Vail, Metcalfe is still digesting this feat, feeling the shock of ticking off a goal set more than a decade ago, playing a mental highlight reel of skiing off a glacier in Denali, swabbing climbers for Covid on the side of the seventh highest mountain in the world; and climbing precariously along a two-foot path beneath the giant serac on K2’s Bottleneck Couloir.
Along the way, Metcalfe navigated a hip and knee replacement, subsequent addiction to Percocet, and a career path that took her from internal medicine to top-of-the-world expedition doctor to, just this past summer, founding Vail’s newest proactive health and performance clinic.
Beneath it all lies a pursuit of excellence and a deep commitment to helping others thrive on the slopes, in the clinic, and in everyday life.
Eighteen-year-old Tracee Metcalfe found her people when she dropped freshman year at UCLA for a ski bum season in Breckenridge.
The self-described unathletic and introverted Southern California girl worked at A&W and delivered pizzas at night so she could ski all day. Summers were all about climbing 14ers, a hobby that hooked her after summiting Mt. Democrat her first season in Colorado. Metcalfe set a goal of climbing all 58 of the state’s 14,000-foot peaks, a vision accomplished methodically across the next 20 years while juggling medical school at CU Denver, residency in Seattle, and a successful hospitalist position at Vail Health for 15 years.
“It gave me a roadmap,” she says. “I would take vacations to the San Juans and knock out five there. I worked my way up to technical mountains, went down to Peru and got guidance on glacier climbing and moved from that to big mountains.”
When an opportunity to work with the Denali volunteer ranger program came around, Metcalfe jumped at the chance to intertwine her two loves: medicine and mountains.
This was the young doctor’s first foray into expedition medicine and it was thrilling.
“I realized I really like combining medicine and mountains,” she says. “The park service needed a medical person, so I was working with rope specialists and rangers.”
Then came the spark to go to the Himalayas, so she applied to work in the emergency room on Everest—a coveted position that takes years to work up to. Instead, Himalayan Experience hired her to be their expedition basecamp doctor in 2014. Metcalfe juggled her work as a hospitalist in Vail with Nepal’s spring and fall climbing seasons, working a ton of winter Vail shifts to afford her 45-day expedition trips where she handled altitude illness, colds, frostbite and sherpa health. Eventually, her skills landed her a different Everest doc spot and she was able to summit the 29,028-foot goddess.
The time came, in 2019, for the doctor to stop exchanging her services for guided climbs and to go all in on the quest to conquer all 14 eight-thousanders.
“I’d had a few experiences where I wasn’t able to summit because people got sick and I needed to do my job,” Metcalfe says. “I’m training all year for these climbs and I realized that, if I was going to go, I wanted to be a paying client and summit.”
After Everest, Metcalfe began checking off Nepalese peaks, joining friends for climbs and tackling breathtaking and daunting Annapurna in 2021. The following year, she summited Dhaulagiri and Kanchenjunga and then went to Pakistan in 2023 for the first time and completed the rest of her summits.
Today, back in Eagle County, Metcalfe is leaning into ski mountaineering (ski-mo) races and climbing 13ers. She’s looking forward to returning to Nepal in 2026 as an ambassador and volunteering at a rural clinic in 2027.
“It’s time for a shift from my personal climbing to giving back to a country that has given me so much,” she says. “Will I ever do another 8,000-meter peak? I don’t know.”
Through all of the personal highs and lows, the surgeries and struggles, the peaks and the perils, Metcalfe has stayed true to high-altitude medicine.
In June 2025, with more than two decades of clinical practice under her belt, Metcalfe opened The Synergy Clinic. Built on Medicine 3.0—proactive, personalized and participatory care—the Avon clinic works to blend functional, traditional and lifestyle medicine.
“Conventional care often focuses on managing illness after it appears,” she says. “Here, we focus on prevention, early detection, and empowering you to take an active role in your health.”
Currently a one-woman show, Metcalfe is serving around 40 patients and loves helping women through perimenopause and menopause.
“I went through menopause early, in my 40s, and it was a challenge finding a doctor that would listen to me,” she says. “It doesn’t need to be a scary thing. It’s part of aging, going through it with education can make a huge difference.”
Whether it’s prescribing hormone replacement therapies, bone density scans, or partnering with a nutritionist and acupuncturist, the goal is to empower patients.
Learn about the Synergy Clinic and book a consultation with Metcalfe at www.thesynergy.clinic
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