[This Mountain Profile essay about Tahoma/Mt. Rainier originally appeared in Alpinist 88, which is now available on newsstands and in our online store. Only a small fraction of our many long-form stories from the print edition are ever uploaded to Alpinist.com. Be sure to pick up Alpinist 88 for all the goodness!–Ed.]
One foot, two crutches, one foot, two crutches. In a hopping step, Sarah Doherty arrived at the peak of Mt. Rainier’s snowcapped expanse and took in the beauty below her. It was early August of 1984, and she had just become the first female amputee to reach the volcano’s summit.
Four decades later, in the autumn of 2023, I received an email from Alpinist editor Paula LaRochelle asking if I’d look into Doherty’s climbing life for a potential story. Doherty had passed away unexpectedly earlier that year. A quick Google search turned up a few obituaries, a slew of social media posts grieving her passing and a now defunct Associated Press article titled “One-Legged Woman Aims for Mount McKinley.” I was intrigued.
At age thirteen, Doherty lost her right leg to a drunk driver, but the accident didn’t stop her from pursuing athletics. By 1983 Doherty had become a nationally ranked paraskier and she moved to Seattle to access the sport year-round. Soon, she began climbing with the guidance of her new friend Wade Harness, who was welcoming and provided her with opportunities in climbing that she had once been excluded from. Doherty also started working with a prosthetist to design a specialized crutch that would allow her to walk more efficiently on snow. Soon, drawing on her new skills, improved tools and inspiration from Don Bennett, the first amputee to summit Mt. Rainier in 1982, Doherty decided she wanted to climb the peak too.
Within a year, Doherty began training by climbing the nearby Mt. Si, running laps up and down the bleachers in a stadium near her home and fine-tuning her snow climbing technique on Rainier’s lower slopes. Having grown up in the lowlands of Taunton, Massachusetts, she worked hard to get her lungs acclimated for the thin air high on Rainier.
By August 3, 1984, Doherty felt ready, and she set out for the summit along with Harness and three other climbers. At around 13,000 feet Doherty lost the ice pick fitted on the bottom of one of her crutches while jumping over a crevasse. The incident delayed the team and Doherty almost lost hope for the summit. She wondered why she chose to put herself through the pain and discomfort of mountaineering. But her team kept her spirits up and they pushed on. Later, on the summit, she understood why. The view stretched on and on beneath her. She could see the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Cascade Mountains to the east.
After the exhausted team staggered back to sea level and returned to their daily lives, Doherty found herself in the limelight. She started fielding calls from reporters, and she was invited to New York to appear on Good Morning America.
While researching Doherty last year, I had many teary conversations with her husband Kerith Perreur-Lloyd, as he told me about the love of his life. I felt his pain and found myself crying silently on the other side of the phone. I also spoke with many other significant people in Doherty’s life—Bill Sumner and Matt Kerns, Doherty’s climbing partners; her daughter Hannah Kellett; and Fred Dunham, Doherty’s longtime friend. As the picture of Doherty formed more clearly in my mind, it soon became hard to write about her like a journalist. It felt like I was penning a tribute to an old friend.
While I was writing the story, Perreur-Lloyd found an unidentified newspaper clipping in the attic of the house he had shared with Doherty. It claimed that Doherty’s teammates carried her gear up Mt. Rainier for her. I raised an eyebrow. It didn’t sound like Doherty.
Sumner told me he remembers it differently. He met Doherty during her historic ascent of Rainier, though they were on different climbing teams. Sumner remembers Doherty carrying a full mountaineer’s load as she climbed on her one leg and two specially designed crutches. Doherty and Sumner would later climb Denali together as she became the first amputee, man or woman, to summit North America’s tallest peak.
I wondered how Doherty felt when she read that article. Did she notice the inaccuracy? Did the reporter get it wrong by falling into the trap of falsely assuming disabled athletes’ abilities? Did they have an archetype in their mind that influenced their descriptions of Doherty? I saw similar things in other newspaper clippings.
After spending eight months reporting on Doherty, I imagined her chuckling as she carefully cut out the article to save. I don’t think she would have been mad. She didn’t climb for accolades or fame. In a typed-up account of her Denali expedition, Doherty wrote that being disabled “wasn’t as much a physical problem, as a social problem.” She noted that people assumed her to be “brave” for simple things like going to the store, and “crazy” for doing something she enjoyed. Even now you see the same tropes in mainstream media. Athletes with disabilities are labeled “inspirations” for showing up at the crag. It is a term that many paraclimbers and para-athletes dislike because it others them for doing what everyone else loves to do, like climb.
Thinking of Doherty brings back memories of a summer I spent in the Pacific Northwest in 2020. For much of that time I was alone and grieving about lost loves, lost time and lost opportunities because of the pandemic. I drove to Paradise and hiked until I could see Mt. Rainier. There were no wildflowers in bloom, but I closed my eyes and imagined them, keeping my eyes closed until I tripped. As I lay on the dirt and stared up at the sky, I remember laughing at my own clumsiness.
Now, with inspiration from Doherty, I’ve started making plans to climb Rainier myself next summer. I’m inspired by her not because she was brave for doing it on one leg, but because she reminds me of why so many of us climb: to push past the discomfort to see the view from up high.
Someone wrote on Facebook after Doherty’s passing: “I never met her, but she changed my life.” By the time my story remembering Doherty was published in Alpinist 86, I felt the same.