Finding Her Peak

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Posted on June 15, 2026 by Carol Mcphail

Carol Mcphail

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The weather was not her friend that day. Rain turned the trail on Mount Kilimanjaro into a muddy stream for Beth Wiggins and the other expedition members as they trekked up the world’s largest freestanding mountain. Wiggins, the only person climbing on prosthetic legs, fell behind as her residual limbs slipped painfully inside the artificial sockets. She stumbled, adjusted and trudged on with the help of her guides.

She reached a stretch of trail covered by fallen trees. A guide said it would not be safe for her to continue the climb.

“It was very hard to hear, but with his experience, I knew in my heart he was right,” says Wiggins. She turned and, with her guides, struggled back down the mountain in the storm to meet a safety vehicle. “I was relieved when I saw that truck, but also so heartbroken because I felt like I had let so many people down.”

That was far from the case.

“Beth understood the decision, supported the team and continued to show up with the same strength of character she brought from day 1,” says Lisa Parmeter, executive director of Merging Vets & Players, the nonprofit that organized the climb. “That kind of mindset, especially in moments that don’t go as planned, is what resilience really looks like.”

The Bridge

Wiggins had lived by that standard as a pro athlete on the softball field, a Marine military police officer in the Marshall Islands and a mother pulling security shifts for Airbus in Mobile to support her son, Eli. She had built a life centered on two things: service and strength.

The ultimate test came one night on a bridge north of Mobile. She was on her way to work when a truck and her motorcycle collided. Wiggins lay on  the pavement with crushed ankles and feet and a damaged femoral artery — the main vessel supplying blood to her leg. Yet, as she called her mother, Carol Wiggins, she was eerily calm.

“Mom,” she said into the phone, “I need you to call 911.”

When Carol Wiggins called back from her home in Atmore moments later to ask how badly she was hurt, her daughter’s voice didn’t waver.

“Mom,” she said, “I’m broken in half.”

Medical Marathon

Paramedics rushed Wiggins to USA Health University Hospital in Mobile, where doctors addressed bleeding and irrigated her wounds to prevent infection. With the only Level I trauma center along the Alabama and Mississippi coasts, University Hospital has the resources to take on such complex cases. Trauma surgeons
and other specialists are available 24/7.

The next day, Dr. Jeffrey Brewer, an orthopaedic surgeon new to USA Health, took on the case, marking the start of a 10-year medical marathon. Brewer saw Wiggins’ athletic mindset as one of her greatest assets through multiple surgeries, including the amputation of both legs and, in recent years, procedures to address nerve pain.

“Right from the get-go, Beth was an incredibly strong person,” Brewer says. “She accepted her condition and dealt with it as well as anybody I’ve ever seen. Then, in addition to that, she embraced it to a point where she was going to do everything possible and prove to people that she could.”

Brewer would follow Wiggins’ progress from when she took the first tentative steps on carbon fiber limbs to the high-impact adventures that followed: skydiving, scuba diving and eventually the call to climb.

The 5-Acre Prayer

Wiggins reclaimed her life in the outdoors, working for a veterans’ nonprofit and taking people with disabilities on hunting trips.

This past September, when she heard about the all-female expedition to Kilimanjaro, she thought and prayed about the climb as she rode her lawn mower across 5 acres of grass. “All I kept hearing from God was, ‘Go for it,’” she says.

While her grit was forged in sports and the Marines, she credits a deeper source for the endurance she needed to navigate the decade after the bridge.

“The truth is that you’re a child of God and that you’re loved unconditionally,” Wiggins says. “No matter what, he’ll give us the strength we need to keep going.”

She spent the next few months training — shouldering a weighted vest and grinding out miles on an inclined treadmill.  Two weeks before Africa, she went to the USA Health Strada Patient Care Center in Mobile for a final checkup with Brewer (now chair and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at South’s  Frederick P. Whiddon College of Medicine).  After a decade, he knew the rhythm of her life better than anyone.

“He’s the most patient-oriented doctor I’ve ever met,” she says. “He listens to me, and he asks about my adventures.”

The Next Horizon

A week after returning from Kilimanjaro, Wiggins emerges from Brewer’s office. “Nothing’s broken,” she tells her mom. She is bruised and sore from the climb but still smiling, remembering the beauty of the mountain rather than the pain of descending prematurely. Around her neck hangs a gold pendant with the word that has defined her last decade: Strength.

The mountain did not defeat her. On Kilimanjaro, success wasn’t going to be measured in vertical feet. Wiggins has been facing mountains for the last 10 years. In each approach, she finds her peak.

“I leave Friday for Utah,” she says, announcing a trip to the National Ability Center in Park City. “I’ve been asked to go to the Olympic training facility to try winter sports.”

And just like that, she’s on to her next adventure.

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