At age eight, Roxy Getter has already broken a world record. She just became the youngest female to climb Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro — all 19,341 feet of it, Travel & Leisure reports. She made the journey with her parents and 10-year-old brother Ben, who traveled to Africa from Florida.
Roxy is just a year older than the record-holder for the youngest Mount Kilimanjaro climber ever, Keats Boyd, who ascended the mountain age age seven in 2008. According to the site Climb Mount Kilimanjaro, neither of them was technically allowed to summit the mountain: The minimum age is 10. The youngest person to get up there without breaking the rules was 10-year-old Jordan Romero.
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Roxy spoke in a video on the day she completed the hike. "I made it up and that was hard. I was so tired. I could barely even walk," she said. The same video shows their first day, where her mom Sarah comments that the tent was "a bit chilly." The temperature was only seven degrees at the top. And the family had never even camped before — they just prepared by running up and down stairs.
"Day one was one of the hardest days… it was like the second hardest… because you had to go like up down and up and down and then you had to do the steep stair," Roxy told CBS Miami.
Both of the kids were troopers, though, according to Sarah. "They were amazing. They did not complain. They just kept going one step in front of the other. They actually kept us going, I think with their positive attitude," she said. "When we got to the top, we just started tearing up. They were in front of us walking and we both just held hands."
So, what's next for the family? Mount Everest? As for Roxy, she's had her fill of mountain-climbing and is ready to stay at sea level for now.
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