Westerville resident and former Marine Steve Polovick never shies away from a challenge. Whether it’s working with at-risk youth or climbing the tallest peak in North America, he deliberately puts himself in situations others would not dare to.
Always looking for a new way to push himself, Polovick began the extreme sport of mountaineering more than 20 years ago. He has summited several challenging mountains including Oregon’s over 11,000-foot Mount Hood, Washington’s nearly 14,500-foot Mount Rainier and, most recently, Denali.
Denali mountain in Alaska has the highest summit in North America, reaching over 20,000 feet in elevation, with a formidable climate that only experienced climbers dare to scale. It has been said to be as difficult or harder to climb than the world’s highest peak of Mount Everest.
In May 2023 after three weeks on Denali, Polovick and his climbing team of other military veterans reached the summit. After braving often minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit weather, the team completed a feat that only about half of those who attempt achieve.
Typically a well-composed man, Polovick says he could not contain his emotions when realizing they had made it to the peak.
“We were kind of looking like drunken snowmen probably at that point,” he says. “The energy, the emotion, everything came out of nowhere. Five of us summited, five grown men, all military veterans, every single one with little frozen tears.”
Polovick’s extreme hobby hasn’t come without accidents and injuries. Months after his climb in May, Polovick is still treating frostbite on his fingers and toes.
High-altitude mountaineering is a dangerous sport, and Polovick has experienced it firsthand. During one solo climb, he took a tumble that convinced him to take a year off of climbing to consider whether it was something he wanted to keep doing.
“I got hit by a wind gust that picked me up and took my crampons, those are the spikes on the boots, tangled them into my pants and just threw me off a ledge, onto another ledge, that cascaded onto another ledge and it was absolutely the end of my life and I knew it,” he says.
Thankfully, Polovick survived the fall and eventually worked up the courage to continue climbing the following year.
But mountaineering isn’t Polovick’s only passion. He has been a social worker for more than 30 years, mostly working with children and teenagers.
In a field as demanding as social work, many people find themselves too burnt out to continue past a decade. While Polovick says his job is exhausting, he loves that kids are typically more willing to change their behaviors compared to adults.
“If you can pull that kid along through those fundamentals, not only do you keep them away from some of the other darker things in the world, but you really help them to tap into what their strengths are and what their identity is going to be,” Polovick says.
One of the most rewarding parts of Polovick’s job is seeing people not only survive, but thrive. A special memory he looks back on was when he helped an incarcerated young woman complete her GED, allowing her to leave prison.
“She kind of burst into tears and jumped in my arms and realized that she was not just going home, but that she was going to be able to start a normal life,” he says. “But it’s a hard thing to get an opportunity from the system sometimes when it’s not set up to give opportunities.”
Outside of work, he leads youths as a volunteer coach for the Westerville Youth Baseball and Softball League.
Raymond G. LaVoie
He volunteered to coach more than 10 years ago when his now 16-year-old daughter Emma started tee-ball at 4 years old. Like his job in social work, Polovick says he enjoys watching the young players’ skills and self-confidence grow over the years.
While Polovick is a part of many people’s support systems, he himself has important people in his life who support him.
Polovick has lived in Westerville for over 20 years. He currently lives with Emma and his wife Ann, and has three adult children, Patrick, Mark and Kate. Polovick’s family all express how proud they are of him, which fills him with pride and motivates him.
Polovick says he greatly appreciates everything Ann does for him.
“I don’t think anybody does a lot of climbing without having a very strong base camp somewhere. She is absolutely my base camp, my biggest fan and biggest critic, but I wouldn’t do half of the things that I do without that kind of support,” he says.
As for the future, Polovick says he hopes to relocate with Ann and go south of the border and is considering entering a new career as a nurse.
“If we could do some work with a population that we can really serve and not do too much paperwork, I have a feeling that that would be like a whole second career,” he says.
All of that said, Polovick is hanging up his crampons and plans to retire from mountaineering. However, he sees it not as an ending, but as a new beginning.
“The mountains have been a big part of my life. So I will find kind of a new mountain somewhere. I know I will,” he says.
Maisie Fitzmaurice is an assistant editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at mfitzmaurice@cityscenemediagroup.com.
