'One step after another': Florida lawyer hikes for a good cause.

Two neurosurgeons huddled for 10 hours triply fusing the cervical spine of Tampa lawyer Nancy Hutcheson Harris, in one of the worst cases they'd handled.

That was 11 years ago. Harris wasn't willing to be grounded by her back spasms and pain, probably stemming from competitive swimming as a girl.

So she asked Dr. Gene Balis if she could work out to strengthen her back without hurting herself, and he answered, yes, if you do it right by walking, strengthening your legs and your core.

Harris took that "yes" and ran with it--or, rather, walked in the most extreme ways possible--to the summit of Kilimanjaro, to the Base Camp of Mount Everest, hiking coast to coast in the United Kingdom, and scrambling on craggy rocks of Corsica, off the coast of France.

Along the way, with every step, 61-year-old Harris has thrust herself out of her comfort zone, proved her mettle, helped disadvantaged school children with $52,973 in donations, and honed her craft as a compassionate divorce lawyer.

"I'd rather be exhausted than disappointed" is Harris's hiking motto that has taken her to the mountain top, and then some.

"I get away to take that aerial view of my life. And, essentially, I come back so much more grateful for everything around me. I come back with a better practice of law. I have a better balance between the personal and professional and things we can do for our firm," said Harris, of Harris & Hunt, who is a member of The Florida Bar's Family Law Section and serves on the Family Law Rules Committee.

She first got the idea to take exercise to an extreme from her friend Lucas Fleming, a St. Petersburg lawyer who started Lawyers for Literacy. He'd summited Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest mountain, and told Harris what a wonderful experience it was. So Harris decided to sign up to climb Kilimanjaro, too.

These days, Harris can be seen hiking with 25 pounds of rocks in her backpack around Bayshore, Davis Island, and over bridges in the Tampa Bay area, training with her girlfriends for their newest adventure slated for November 2017: a grueling trek through the mountainous Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.

So far, Harris has climbed 17,999 feet to Mount Everest's Ice Falls in 2014, raising $18,758 for Tampa's Academy Prep school; hiked the Coast to Coast, north-south length of England in 2015, raising another $25,265; scrambled up and down more than 60,000 feet of craggy terrain on the island nation of Corsica, off the coast of France this year, raising...