The smile is broad, the triumph is apparent. Merilyn (Nimtz) Swanson, Renton High Class of ‘47, is standing on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. She’s 81.

On her way to Africa and the summits of the 26 skyline peaks surrounding Anchorage, Alaska, Swanson spent her high school years in Kennydale. She was athletic and adventurous even then, traits she never lost and honed even more in her 60 years in Alaska.

Her family moved from Illinois, her birthplace, to Renton just in time for her to begin her freshman year at Renton High School. She couldn’t ice skate like she did in Illinois, but she could sure rollerskate and play basketball.

“I played basketball all the time,” she said. Back then, girls didn’t play basketball for their high school. But there was girls team in Kennydale. The coach was the Renton High history teacher.

She rollerskated at Rollerland in Renton, just across Rainier Avenue from what is now McLendon hardware. Billed as “The Nation’s Finest Skating Pavilion,” Rollerland was destroyed by fire in July 1963, its famed organ lost.

“I learned all the dances on rollerskates,” Swanson says.

Used to a one-room school in Barrington, Ill., she felt lost “with all those people” at Renton High. She “hated” her freshman year, but as a sophomore she made a lot of friends. “From then on, I had a good time,” she says.

One of her best friends then and now is Gloria Grace Jacobs, who still lives in Kennydale, just four blocks from where she grew up. She’s lived there for 51 years, raising her five children (all Hazen High graduates – the boundaries were changed.)

It seems that Gloria was the ringleader.

“I got her into more trouble that she should have,” said, Jacobs, 82, and fellow 1947 grad, quickly adding “not really bad trouble.”

“We did everything together,” Merilyn said, including play basketball.

While Merilyn rollerskated, Grace worked at Rollerland. She cried when it burned. Merilyn moved to Alaska in 1951, while Grace was still in college. “She was supposed to wait for me,” Grace said.

But Swanson, who was working for Imperial Candy in Seattle at the time, had a chance to go to Juneau, Alaska. It’s there that she met and married Bob Swanson. She has a son, Trent, and a daughter, Holly, and eight grandchildren. Her husband and second son are deceased.

“I have led a very adventurous life,” she says. To say she’s a runner is an understatement. On Nov. 16, 2006, she ran her 50,000th mile over 33 years, tracked by her running club. The achievement was carved in the Alaskan snow. Training for marathons seemed almost constant.

And then there’s that climbing. Twice she attempted to reach the summit of Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the nation’s highest peak at 20,320 feet, but never met that goal. Had she succeeded in 2005, when she was 75, she would have been the oldest person to conquer the massive mountain.

And then there’s that photo – taken Dec. 5, 2010 – from the top of Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa, at 19,340 feet. “I made it with no problem,” she said, despite worries about her food intake. It made up, she says, for not summitting McKinley.

That day in Tanzania certainly was proof that Swanson was still up for another challenge in her long life filled with adventure around the world.

Merilyn Swanson writes about her family and her adventures in “My 57 Years in Alaska, published in March 2009 by Swanson Press, Anchorage, Alaska.