Shannon Bond/Staff Writer
Altitude sickness and a broken SideStix sports crutch were not enough to keep Sarah Doherty from living out a dream to summit Mount Kilimanjaro.
Doherty struggled against the odds, and with the help of her Tanzanian guide Sosta, finished the climb. "There was no way I was going down. I was going up," Doherty recalled. "Sosta proved he could be the other weight-bearing crutch for me."
Doherty and her partner Kerith Perreur-Lloyd chose Kilimanjaro as the field-test site for their latest prototype of her sports crutch invention called SideStix. As a young teen, Doherty was hit by a drunk driver and lost her right leg. The athlete realized waiting for a product to make recreational pursuits easier wasn't working, so she invented SideStix.
SideStix enables those with a leg amputation or people who cannot bear full weight on their legs with the ability to remain active. SideStix uses a shock absorption system that reduces the overall impact a person puts on their arm joints and has interchangeable "feet" to use on different surfaces.
Doherty, Perreur-Lloyd, Doherty's twin sister Susan Gabriel and friend Ellen Clemence made the trip together in January and kept a detailed blog of the adventure that can be linked from www.sidestix.com. In it, the group tells about dealing with nausea and headaches from the high altitude, their daily experiences and Perreur-Lloyd's heroic run back down the mountain in an effort to fix the broken SideStix with a rock-hammer and spare parts.
Doherty sounded irritated with herself when she talked about her overconfidence in the prototype. The group had departed from the final hut for the summit around midnight and the SideStix broke 90 minutes into their ascent. "I was in complete shock when I saw the break [in the SideStix], she said. "I was so confident these guys were going to work I didn't have a second set of SideStix with me."
Doherty hit a low when she saw the damage.
"I was devastated," she said and admitted she shed some tears and felt defeated for a few minutes.
Perreur-Lloyd and his guide dashed down the mountain to repair the broken SideStix while Gabriel and Clemence forged ahead toward the summit. The group made a pact before starting the climb that in the event that any of them had to turn back, those who could carry on would. Doherty and Sosta sat in the dark and waited for Perreur-Lloyd to return.
After about 10 minutes, Doherty said she was getting cold and decided to go for it.
The pair, with Sosta using his forearm as the missing crutch for Doherty, began hopping up Kilimanjaro 15 steps at a time.
"He only knew how to count to 10, so I counted the other five. It was pretty hard hopping, but I wanted to see above the clouds," Doherty said. Perreur-Lloyd recounted his experience by blog of running down then back up the mountain with the patched sports crutch, only to discover that Doherty had carried on with only one SideStix.
"With my eyes full of tears, tears of love, admiration and awe, at her sheer determination and audacity, we carried on for a further 30 minutes, until from up ahead we heard the voice of Sosta calling down to us," said Perreur-Lloyd. "It was 5 a.m. and Sarah had hopped - with Sosta's assistance - for two and a half hours, covering one and a half miles [2.4 kilometres] and 1,000 foot (300 metre) vertical gain."
In the end, Doherty technically fell short of summit by about an hour's climbing, but she made it high enough to see the view.
"It was 9:30 a.m. and we were 18,711 ft. [5,700 metres] above sea level," recalls Perreur-Lloyd. "Against all odds, Sarah had climbed, hopped and scrambled up the hardest part of Mount Kilimanjaro. She could see Uhuru Peak and yet knew that although she had the strength to make the summit, she didn't have the time."
Doherty recalled sitting at Gill-man's Point where her ascent ended. "It was a really insightful experience for me. I thought, 'I'm good at this and I really like it,'" Doherty said, marvelling at seeing above the clouds as the sun rose. After a 25-year absence from mountain climbing, Doherty realized it fulfills her in a way that no other sport can.
"This is familiar, it's comfortable and I feel at home [on the mountain]," she said.
As for the SideStix, it broke much like someone's arm that has broken a second time. "We should have stress-tested it much more before climbing Kilimanjaro," Doherty said. Doherty said she has received more than 40 emails from people around the globe who followed her adventure and who would like SideStix to help them remain active.
"I don't see [the break] as failing. It's the field-test that gives us information so the consumer won't have to experience it," she said. "I've learned more from my mistakes and weaknesses, and [the climb] was a success."
