Lucy Westlake has quite the resume

Lucy Westlake is more than just a stud runner: She’s also the youngest American woman to climb Mount Everest, a clean water advocate and a recipient of a Billie Jean King Youth Leadership Award. (That’s all in addition to being a bona fide star of the cross country team.)

Now, you can add another accolade to that list — the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, an award that recognizes young people who make a significant impact on people, their communities and the environment. The freshman received her award for raising more than $30,000 to bring safe water technology to the developing world. 

“It was amazing just to have your work recognized,” Westlake said. “I love what I do, and I have had this passion since I was 13 years old, so it’s been a long time just kind of building.”

Westlake began her water advocacy after her Ugandan penpal, Faith — who she’s corresponded with since age two — told Westlake of her daily two-mile walk to fetch contaminated water. The two originally met through Samaritan’s Purse, and have remained friends ever since.

Nearly a decade after their first correspondence, Westlake discovered WaterStep, a nonprofit that installs sustainable chlorinators around the world. Soon after, Westlake and her family went to Uganda to meet Faith and install a chlorinator in her village.

That certainly wasn’t the end of it. Westlake went on to organize a shoe drive at her school to provide affordable footwear for people in developing countries and funds for WaterStep, which she later expanded to ten high schools that organize shoe drives every March on World Water Day. The group has raised $25,000 so far. 

Earlier this year, Westlake graduated high school a semester early and met up with Faith again, installing more chlorinator systems and touring different WaterStep projects. The early graduation also meant that Westlake could attempt to summit Mount Everest — which she did, becoming the youngest American woman in history to do so.

“I was like, ‘Wow, I did it,”’ Westlake told the Daily Trojan in June. “I was just really proud of myself and I was thinking about how proud my family and friends would be of me, especially my family, who invested so much in me.” 

A mountaineer since age seven, Westlake has also summited the highest point in all 50 U.S. states, and is currently attempting to complete the Explorers Grand Slam, a challenge to reach the highest point on all seven continents plus the north and south poles.

It’s not always smooth sailing, though. Westlake said that earlier in her climbing career, she’d often have to work to prove that she belonged on the mountains.

“Especially with my age and then also being a woman in the mountains — and I’m just small [in] stature in general — people just kind of assume when they look at me that I’m going to be the weakest on the team,” Westlake said. “I’ve learned to just kind of be like, ‘Okay, that can be what you think at first, but I’m gonna prove you wrong.’” 

Often that means going out of her way to help out fellow climbers or jump at jobs that others don’t want to pick up. Although, as one might expect, Westlake said that summiting Everest tends to open doors.

So what’s it like for a genuine minor celebrity to study at USC while juggling her water advocacy, mountaineering and Division I DI running? 

“It’s been hard for sure,” Westlake said. “With the semester off after high school, I kind of just got to do what I wanted: I went and climbed mountains, I went to Africa … But now that I’m in school, it’s like, no free time. I just run from one activity to the next.”

She has faith that everything will pay off in the long run, she said — she’s a public policy major, and wants to work on the policy side of addressing the world water crisis — but it can certainly be hard to balance all of her outside-of-school ambitions while cramming for midterms or waking up early for cross country practice. (Though luckily, Westlake said that her running doubles as her mountaineering training.)

In the first two cross country meets of the season, Westlake has quickly established herself as a star of the women’s distance running program, placing highest on the team in every race. 

So what’s next for Westlake? In December, she hopes to summit Carstensz Pyramid in Papua New Guinea, then reach the North Pole in April and the South Pole in December 2023 — all part of the Explorers Grand Slam. (Her Instagram handle is aptly titled @whatsnextlucy.) 

For now, though, she’s working with her sports agent to find sponsors to provide the funds to make the expeditions possible in the first place.

“Mountaineering especially is a very exclusive sport — there aren’t a lot of women in the mountains, there aren’t a lot of young people,” Westlake said. “The best way to make it more inclusive is to just show that it can be done … I just want to motivate people to climb their own mountains.”