Christy Renee Stehle

The Summit Within: A Mile-High Journey Home to Myself.

While staying in Bled, Slovenia, Christy Renee Stehle set out to hike Triglav Mountain in the Julian Alps—a 2.5-hour ascent gaining over 700 meters, from exhilaration to tear-inducing terror. Clipped to a steel cable, she climbed inch by inch, her breath syncing with the wind as she faced her lifelong fear of heights. “Every ledge I pulled myself over mirrored a part of me that was learning to hold on,” she writes. By the time she reached the summit, the world opened into snow-capped peaks and possibility, and she realized the only way out is through—one trembling step at a time.

Author Christy Renee Stehle in the Julian Alps.

Later, that climb became a mirror for a deeper journey. For years, Christy chased belonging through achievement—the next passport stamp, the next relationship, the next gold star. Fulfillment, she believed, waited beyond the next plane ticket. But the summit that mattered most wasn’t on a mountain in Slovenia—it was the moment she stopped running and started listening. “I wasn’t chasing adventure,” she admits. “I was chasing a sense of home.”

That homecoming began not abroad, but back where her story started—in Marietta, Georgia. Stripped of titles and expectations, she laid down the mask of performance and met her truest self. Stillness, once terrifying, became the doorway to peace. From that inner steadiness, everything else aligned: community, work, voice. Opportunities arrived that matched who she’d become, not who she performed to be.

Christy’s story is a map for anyone who’s ever tried to outrun emptiness with achievement. The climb wasn’t just physical; it was a practice: reach, breathe, trust, repeat. And it’s the same practice she uses now—choosing herself first, building a life from the inside out, and helping others do the same.

Read Christy’s full chapter in Wanderlust Chronicles: Transformative Travel Tales—true journeys that lead us back to ourselves.