Renata Chlumska is a famous mountaineer, adventurer and motivational speaker based in Sweden. She became the first Swedish woman to climb Mount Everest in 1999, when she was still in her 20s.
Renata has climbed all Seven Summits. After climbing Mount Everest in 1999, she climbed the equally challenging Mount Kilimanjaro in 2000. She then went on a climbing spree in 2014, getting to the top of Mount McKinley, the Carstensz Pyramid, the Mount Elbrus, the Aconcagua and Mount Vinson that year.
Renata is forever willing to take on new challenges and has already done many great things in her young life. Born in 1973 in the city of Malmö, she had a comfortable middle class life. But she wanted more; she wanted to venture out of the safe environs of her hometown and explore the world to the fullest.
Renata has gone on to become one of the most famous adventurers of her generation. She is also a highly paid motivational speaker and a smart businesswoman with many commercial ventures linked to her passion to seek out new dangers. She is also an expert mountain climber and horse rider.
What many don’t know about Renata is that she had to overcome a great tragedy at a relatively young age. Renata was in love with the famous Swedish adventurer Göran Kropp, and was engaged to him. They were living in the United States and planned to take on many adventures together.
However, their happy love story ended in a truly heartbreaking tragedy. Göran fell 75 feet to his death on September 30, 2002 when climbing the Air Guitar route on the Frenchmen Coulee in Washington State. It was a freak accident in which all of his climbing protection failed completely and he died of serious head injuries.
Göran was a celebrity much before Renata became one. His 1996 bicycle journey from Sweden to Nepal in Asia was covered extensively by the media. He climbed Mount Everest without oxygen during that trip. He was called the “Crazy Swede” and was declared to be “the most entertaining adventurer on Earth” by the National Geographic Adventure magazine in their May 2002 article, “The World According to Kropp.”
Renata was devastated by Göran’s death, but she did not give up. She decided to follow through on what she and Göran planned to do and went on an “Around America Adventure” in 2005, where she used just a kayak and a bicycle to traverse or circumnavigate all of the 48 states of the United States.
She completed her great adventure in 439 days, paddling the kayak from Florida to Maine and from Seattle to San Diego and cycling with the kayak fixed to a carriage from San Diego to Texas. She completed her journey on 15 September, 2006. September 15 has been declared as the “Renata Chlumska Day” in Seattle.
As Renata explains, “In other parts of the world I have to be careful and use a bit of stealth… In the U.S. I sometimes camped where I wasn’t supposed to and slept with a knot in my stomach. Access to fresh water can be problematic as well. When I’m out kayaking on the West coast in Sweden I don’t even have to consider who owns this or that small island when I choose where to land.”
Wow! What a woman! Ysweden.com
