Adventure Diane: Meet Diane

From the Wichita Eagle, September 10, 2010

If there's a mountain between Wichitan Diane Palmer and another significant accomplishment in a life full of them, well, she'll just climb the darn thing.

Even if it extends more than 19,000 feet into the heavens and takes eight days to scale. Even if by the time you get halfway to the top, you start to notice that air is in short supply. Even if Mount Kilimanjaro, in the east Africa country of Tanzania, is the highest free-standing mountain in the world.

Diane's Duplex Home-dates to 1924

Palmer, who lives in Riverside and will be 65 in October, has a list — she doesn't call it a bucket list but instead a vision board — of the things she still wants to do. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is next up, to be followed, she hopes, by a trip to Antarctica and a climb down the Grand Canyon.

She's already been on a safari in Nepal and a flying expedition to Mount Everest. She climbed to Taktsang Monastery in Bhutan in 2008, and rode a yak in Changu (Tso-Mgo) Lake in Sikkim, India, at 12,400 feet. And that's just to name a few of Palmer's excursions.

If there's a place you can't find on a map, she's probably climbed a mountain there.

Diane's Famiily, Diane,second row, Circa 1952

The youngest of nine children who grew up on a farm in southern Kingman County, Palmer said she has always been adventurous. And now that she's retired from health care consulting, a job that took her to every state except Alaska, she's ready to put on her wings.

From the Wichita Eagle September 10, 2010
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