Out‐of‐Pocket: Over the Top

It was dark—pitch‐dark. The temperature was so cold her water bottle became a brick of ice. Her feet felt that way, too, as the unrelenting wind danced in a frenzy around her. And she was so tired from being awakened at midnight for the 3,000‐foot final trek to the summit of the African mountain that she didn't think she could make it all the way. At that moment, Jaye Hewitt Semrod—who, had she not been scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro would have been at her senior vice president post in a New York consulting firm—had only one thought in her mind: “What am I doing here?”