SEATTLE — Jim Whitaker, who in 1963 became the first American to summit Mount Everest, has died. He was 97 years old.
Whittaker’s 1963 ascent of Mount Everest came 10 years after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first ascent to the summit.
Whitaker died Tuesday at his home in Port Townsend, Washington. According to a statement by his family.
His feat on Mount Everest made the once-shy and courageous climber an instant celebrity, in demand for public appearances and expected to lend his support to worthy causes.
This gave him access to the world of celebrities, including the inner circles of the Kennedy clan. He became close friends with Robert Kennedy, with whom he climbed a 14,000-foot (4,267 m) Canadian peak named Mount Kennedy after the 1968 assassination of the presidential rival.
Whitaker, who was Kennedy’s campaign chairman in the state, was deeply shocked by his death.
Bobby Kennedy was “one of the toughest little guys I ever saw,” said the 6-foot-5 Whitaker. “It is not the size of your wound that matters, but how strong your wound is.”
Whitaker’s career on the slopes began when he took on a scouting mission in Washington’s Olympic Mountains, and he once saw the beauty and danger of his sport as sharpening the senses.
“You’re in nature, participating in God’s creation… It’s a very high, such a spiritual thing,” Whitaker said in a 1981 interview.
“I think it’s good to participate in that and face life,” he added. “When you live on the edge, you can see a little further.”
Risks are part of the game.
“Mountains are beautiful, but they don’t really care,” Whittaker noted in 1987.
His feats on the remote snow-covered slopes of Mount Everest and in close proximity to K2, the world’s second highest peak, have secured him a prominent place in the record books. He shared the status of a world-class climber with his identical twin, Lou, who led the first American expedition to climb the North Face of Mount Everest.
Lou Whitaker has died In 2024 at the age of 95.
But Jim Whitaker himself said one of his proudest moments came in 1981, when he led 10 disabled climbers up the 14,410-foot Mount Rainier. “For them, this was Mount Everest,” he later said.
Whitaker has climbed Mount Rainier more than 100 times, but he never takes its familiar aspects for granted. He once noted that the vagaries of weather, even on a relatively modest mountain, “can turn a good climber into a novice” in a matter of hours.
After years of venturing on the world’s most dizzying heights, Whittaker said in a 1980 interview that he hoped “to die in my sleep with the television on.”
In recent years, Whittaker has been one of many climbers who have resisted the idea of requiring climbers to wear electronic GPS devices in some circumstances. Such a proposal was made to climbers on Oregon’s Mount Hood, where more than 35 climbers have died since the early 1980s.
Whittaker told The Associated Press in 2007 that it was fine for individual climbers to wear the devices, but imposing the requirement would take many away from the mystique of climbing.
“If you take all the risks in life, you lose a lot,” Whitaker said by cellphone from Idaho, where he was on a climbing trip. “You’re taking away personal freedom from someone who wants to go and explore without having a safety net.” “You want to go into the wilderness and enjoy nature and not be followed.”