When she was younger, Sarah Prager thought she’d climb mountains for a living. Now 48 and living in Wedgwood, she started mountaineering in college and worked as an instructor after she graduated.
“I love many things about mountaineering,” she told me. “It brings me much closer to all the elements of basic survival—cooking over a camp stove, gathering and treating all our water, setting up the tarp or tent each night for shelter. And the fact that I have to carry everything on my back also really helps me pare down to what is truly essential.”
Prager planned to keep leading people up mountains, but then, while working at a mountaineering company in Seattle, she started volunteering at Planned Parenthood once a week. The job was basic—administrative stuff, mostly—but it was there that Prager’s life changed, because it was while observing doctors and patients at Planned Parenthood that she decided to give up professional mountaineering and become an abortion provider.
