Maybe it began when Elyse Ping Medvigy routinely climbed out of her crib as a baby.
“She’s always been a climber,” said her mom, Christine.
Or maybe it began when Ping Medvigy tore through a 17-mile round-trip hike at Half Dome in California at age 8. She joined her dad, Gary, on the steep hike, which Gary described as “not for the faint of heart.”
“If she is afraid, she overcomes it,” Gary said from their Camas home.
It can be difficult to decipher exactly when Ping Medvigy became what some would call an “adrenaline junkie,” but that doesn’t matter much to her.
“This is me. This is what I like doing,” Ping Medvigy said, while FaceTiming from Ethiopia, where she’s doing a U.S. State Department internship.
More important than when Ping Medvigy developed her fearlessness is where that fearlessness has taken her. She was the first U.S. female active-duty soldier to summit Mount Everest. And she was the Army’s first female artillery officer chosen to integrate into an all-male light infantry company in 2014. Ping Medvigy said that in her artillery company in South Korea she was the only woman, serving with 80 males.
Ping Medvigy is also a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan, and summited North America’s highest peak, Denali in Alaska, as the leader of a nonprofit scientific research expedition with U.S. Expeditions and Explorations, or USX.
USX is a veteran’s nonprofit, and the focus of Ping Medvigy’s Denali expedition in May was to assist in research-gathering by wearing a state of the art electrocardiogram device over her heart so that her heartbeat and all of its different rhythms could be measured as she acclimatized to higher elevations. The electrocardiogram sensors were donated by Cardiac Insight, Inc., and the research will be published in a medical journal by Dr. David Ohlson, who is a physician at Bingham Memorial Hospital in Idaho.
“The technology is incredible, but the scientific community is still learning quite a bit about what goes through the different systems in our bodies as we go up in altitude,” Ping Medvigy said.
Ping Medvigy also climbed Mount Everest a couple years ago as part of a USX expedition. She started high-altitude hiking with Mount Kilimanjaro when she was 19, and loves being in the mountains.
“Standing up at the top of the world, whether it be Everest or another peak, it’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s as close as you can get to the heavens. It’s a surreal experience. There’s a little bit of pride involved, but it’s mostly just awe.”
Ping Medvigy went into the military for several reasons, some she admits are cliche, such as wanting to do something bigger than herself, and because her father served 33 years in the Army.
Her younger sister, Riley, graduated from West Point recently, and is currently in medical school at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. The siblings room together in Maryland, with Ping Medvigy completing her graduate studies at Georgetown University.
Her parents moved to Camas from California a year-and-a-half ago in search of greener pastures, fewer droughts and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
A trailblazer
Ping Medvigy’s military firsts for women were mostly a consequence of following her dreams, she said.
Graduating from West Point in 2012, a school Ping Medvigy said was only about 15 percent female then, prepared her for being the Army’s first female artillery officer chosen to integrate into an all-male light infantry company.
“It just kind of happened. I was always interested in howitzers. I liked blowing things up, shooting big guns,” she explained. “I guess, in some ways, I did want to be a trailblazer. I wanted to show that it really came down to character and competency. My gender had nothing to do with it. That’s what I advocated for time and time again a few years ago when this debate was on the table. It really didn’t matter. I’ve seen the big, tough infantry guys just fall apart when it came to difficult missions, and then girls that stepped up. So I really just didn’t put any weight on gender.”
Ping Medvigy is on her second State Department internship — the first was in the Republic of Congo. She enjoys Africa’s diversity, unexplored areas and the potential the continent holds. Her dream is to work in counterterrorism in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Uncomfortable environments,” she said, “austere environments are where, I think, you really come to terms with your own limitations and start pushing them.”
