Scaling New Heights in Fundraising

Iloo Gruder’s mountain treks aid research. Photo by Richard Patterson

As fundraising activities go, bake sales are on the tame side for Aventura, Fla., grandmother Iloo Gruder, 72. She prefers to raise cash for medical research and treatment by scaling some of the planet’s most spectacular mountains.

Gruder recently ascended a 14,000-foot Himalayan summit in Bhutan and raised $17,000 for the neurology department at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. She was part of a 13-person group that included two of her four daughters.

Gruder has been seen atop Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro—her first conquest in 1996—as well as on Mount Blanc in the Alps, and at Peru’s Machu Picchu, Japan’s Mount Fuji and Mount Everest in Nepal. Her climbs have raised more than $169,000 from sponsoring contributors to help find cures for illnesses that impact her family: Her daughter Cindy Yonover contracted multiple sclerosis in 1995; her husband, Robert, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2006.

“I’m really loving it,” Gruder says of her trekking-for-dollars exploits. She came to love climbing later in life after buying a home in Aspen, Colo.

Gruder says her latest three-day trek was exhilarating, but the food—well, not so much. “There’s nothing worse than dried yak.”