When Dee White wrote us in praise of our Down Jacket last year, she described such a thrilling adventure climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa, we immediately called her up to hear more.
As it turns out, Dee, a 41-year-old, married mother of three from Hudson, Wisconsin, caught the Lands’ End® bug from her father, Donald Neyendorf. “He was a Lands’ End addict,” says Dee, “right down to his underwear!”
So it’s no surprise she turned to us when packing for her African sojourn last year, choosing the Down Jacket because it was the only affordable, women’s style she found with a down hood and great fit. “So many others were just way out of my price range. When I found yours, I said, ‘This is the coat!’”
Naturally, her dad influenced more than her choice in clothing. The adventurous spirit that landed her in Africa came from him, too. “My dad was handicapped, and he always talked about traveling,” says Dee, “but he couldn’t. That definitely had to do with my wanderlust. Sometimes he thought I was a little crazy, but he was always supportive.”

Even Dee felt she might be a little crazy to travel alone for three weeks in Africa — not to mention climb 19,341 feet to the top of the continent’s highest mountain. The trip certainly tested her: though physically fit for the climb, Kilimanjaro delivered a punch to her psyche. After five days of climbing — including an hours-long summit push in weather befitting a Wisconsin blizzard — and one “mental breakdown,” Dee finally summited on June 21, 2005.
Atop the peak, “it was surreal,” Dee says, almost like an out-of-body experience. She was awed by the towering glaciers and vast African savannah below. And she was plenty warm — despite subzero windchills — in her Lands’ End Down Jacket!

Safely down the mountain, Dee traveled on to western Africa. Knowing the temperatures there would be in the 90s, she left her warm clothing with the guides and porters on Kilimanjaro. But Dee held on to her Down Jacket, which she used as a pillow the entire trip: “If I wasn’t wearing it on the mountain, it was under my head!” It served her so well, she’s looking forward to the water-resistant version available this year. It’s the kind of innovation her father might have loved, too.
Sadly, Donald passed away last September. But since Dee says he often looked like he stepped off a page in one of our catalogs, we can only imagine how tickled he’d be to know she actually ended up on one.