Jim Whittaker, first American climber to scale Mt. Everest, dies at 97

For 20 minutes of his life, Jim Whittaker was on top of the world.

He was the first American to summit Mt. Everest, reaching the highest point on Earth on May 1, 1963, with Sherpa Nawang Gombu.

“We were standing in the jet stream, on the edge of space,” Whittaker wrote in his 1999 memoir, “A Life on the Edge.”

He returned home a hero, with his picture on the cover of Life magazine, a White House fete and unexpected celebrity. And though life off the mountain didn’t always go smoothly, he disdained regret.

“If you stick your neck out, whether it’s by climbing mountains or speaking up for something you believe in, your odds of winning are at least fifty-fifty,” he wrote. “On the other hand, if you never stick your neck out, your odds of losing are pretty close to 100%.”

An adventurer until the end, Whittaker died Tuesday at his home in Port Townsend, Wash., his son Leif confirmed to the New York Times. Whittaker was 97.

He was 34 when he scaled Everest, a feat that shaped much of the rest of his life. His Washington state license plate read 29028, the generally accepted height of Everest when he climbed it. (GPS surveys later put it at about 29,035 feet.)

He was chosen for the expedition by its leader, Swiss mountaineer Norman Dyhrenfurth, because of his experience in climbing under icy conditions, including numerous summits of Mt. Rainier near his Seattle-area home.

But Everest, first scaled in 1953 by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was a far more formidable and dangerous beast. And even if the Dyhrenfurth expedition was successful, only a chosen few of its 19 team members would reach the top. Still, Whittaker thought his chances were good.

“I’d trained hard, put 60 pounds of bricks in my backpack,” he told National Geographic Adventure magazine in 2003. “I swam in Lake Sammamish in winter to build up to the cold we would encounter.

“I didn’t know anyone who was in better shape.”

On only the second day of the group’s climb from base camp, tragedy struck when a giant section of an icefall — a glacier formation resembling a frozen waterfall — shifted, crushing team member Jake Breitenbach.

“I had told everyone back home that Everest was not a difficult climb technically; the only problem was the lack of oxygen and the weather,” Whittaker wrote in “Life on the Edge.” “Now it had killed one of us, and we’d only just begun.”

Because the only way to get back to base camp was via that icefall, Whittaker chose to stay above it on the mountain for five steady weeks as more camps were established up Everest. He lost 25 pounds and a considerable amount of strength due to the thin air.

Still, he was in better condition than many of the other climbers, and Dyhrenfurth chose him for the final assault. He and Gombu left the last camp in the middle of a windstorm, with a scant supply of oxygen.

How hard was it to breathe? “Put a pillow on your face, run around the block, and try and suck oxygen through that pillow,” he said. It was so cold, one of his eyeballs froze, making it unusable.

Reaching the summit after several hours, they stayed only long enough to take pictures and plant flags as 50-mph winds whipped around them.

“When you are up there, you are not ecstatic, you are not afraid,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2013. “You’re really not anything. But in the back of your mind, you know one thing: You gotta get off. Half of the climb is getting up, the other half is getting down.”

James Whittaker was born on Feb. 10, 1929, in Seattle, about 10 minutes before the birth of Louie, his twin brother. As the boys grew up, they took to roughhousing around the house, much to the chagrin of their mother.

“I believe that command to ‘Go outside and play’ is what started Louie and me on the path we have taken ever since,” Whittaker wrote.

He was active in Boy Scouts and as a teenager joined a mountaineering club that sponsored climbs on the nearby Olympic and Cascade ranges. He tested himself on increasingly higher peaks, relishing moments such as breaking through cloud layers.

“I think nature is a great teacher,” he told the Seattle Times in 2013. “Being in nature that way is a good way to find out who the hell you are.”

After finishing West Seattle High School, Whittaker went on to Seattle University, graduating in 1952. He was promptly drafted into the Army, but his mountaineering experience led him to be assigned to the Mountain and Cold Weather Training Command in Colorado instead of combat duty in Korea.

In 1955, he became the first full-time employee of the Recreational Equipment Cooperative (later called REI) when it was housed in a 20-by-30-foot space above a Seattle restaurant. In his first year, he expanded the co-op’s offerings into ski equipment and introduced new concepts — such as opening on Saturday mornings so customers could pick up equipment for weekend trips — that boosted sales.

Whittaker, pictured on April 12, 1975, in Seattle, shows some of the gear he would be taking for an expedition to climb K2 on the China-Pakistan border.

(Associated Press)

Because of his connection to the co-op, he was appointed equipment coordinator of the Everest climb, and REI agreed to keep him on the payroll during the expedition.

In July 1963, he and other members of the Everest team, including Gombu, were presented the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society — which partially sponsored the expedition — by President Kennedy, four months before the president was assassinated.

Two years later, Whittaker led a climb up Mt. Kennedy, a nearly 14,000-foot Canadian peak named for JFK, with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in the climbing party. The two men forged a close friendship that extended to the wider Kennedy clan. In subsequent years, Whittaker went on ski vacations with the Kennedys, was a guest at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., and hosted gatherings in Seattle that included mountain climbing.

Whittaker organized Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign efforts in the Pacific Northwest and spoke to him by phone only minutes before the candidate was fatally shot in Los Angeles. Whittaker caught a flight to L.A. and was at the senator’s hospital bedside when he died and then served as a pallbearer at the funeral.

In mountaineering, Whittaker was closely involved in more high-profile ventures. He led a 1975 expedition up the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, that failed to reach the top. His return expedition in 1978 was successful, though he chose not to go to the summit himself.

That same year, he decided to quit REI, partly because of friction with the co-op’s board. He had been president and chief executive since 1971, and when he left, the co-op was a $46-million business with more than 700 employees.

Whittaker throws the ceremonial first pitch before a baseball game between the Mariners and the Angels in 2013.

(Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)

Income from an endorsement agreement helped keep him financially sound, but an investment in a new outdoor gear company proved to be a disaster. The financial irregularities of a partner, who was convicted of felony bank fraud, doomed the venture, and Whittaker was left holding the financial bag.

He was nearly wiped out but got back his financial footing when a venture capitalist asked him in 1986 to be chairman of the board, with stock options, of a new company called Magellan. It was a pioneer in GPS consumer electronics and holds numerous patents in the field.

Appropriately, Whittaker called one of the chapters midway through his book “Roller Coaster.” But he finished it with “Life Well Lived.”

“If you aren’t living on the edge,” he wrote, “you’re taking up too much space.”

Whittaker is survived by his wife, Dianne Roberts, and children Bobby, Joss and Leif.

Colker is a former Times staff writer.