Jim Whittaker obit

Famed mountaineer Jim Whittaker, first American atop Mount Everest, dies at 97

 

Longtime Port Townsend resident inspired generations of alpinists, defined an active NW outdoor lifestyle

He was not on the list.

Until his dying day, Northwest icon and alpine legend Jim Whittaker remembered his first glimpse at Mount Everest from the window of a Nepalese airliner while heading to climb the world’s tallest mountain in 1963. He saw the 29,028-foot peak not as something to be conquered, but embraced.

“I wanted to become its friend,” he would recall, decades later. The famed peak ultimately became something much more than just a “friend” to Whittaker, of Port Townsend, the first American to step on its summit.

The historic ascent on May 1, 1963, catapulted Whittaker, who died peacefully at home with family April 7 in Port Townsend at the age of 97, to the pinnacle of fame as a genuine 20th-century American folk hero. 

Landmarks in Whittaker’s long life include being the first full-time employee of Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) and later its chief executive, and a close friendship with former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy that turned into a longer connection to the Kennedy family. But his fame grew from exploits as a celebrated climber with a legacy of both daredevil and humanitarian feats on the world’s tallest peaks.

The Seattle native reflected 50 years later on how much the Everest climb had shaped the rest of his life, explaining that he embraced a spirit of gratitude and childlike wonder with every experience thereafter. 

“I think I will probably take it with me into my next life, if I have one,” Whittaker once said.

Known as Big Jim to the climbing community, the 6-foot-5 mountaineer clutched those sacred ideals to the end. 

Whittaker, however, never let the worldwide Everest acclaim define him; he left a broader, crampon-deep imprint on American outdoor recreation, with a distinct Northwestern flavor the famed mountaineer literally embodied.

The gentle climbing giant always seemed ready to forge ahead to the next summit, whether it was diving to the dangerous depth of 180 feet underwater or organizing Himalayan expeditions for purposes greater than his own glory.

“He didn’t just arrive at the summit and then stay there forever as a shrine to his singular accomplishment,” said Melissa Arnot Reid, the first American woman to successfully summit Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen. “One of the major impacts for me is this idea that no one accomplishment is like your arrival point in adventure. Adventure is the forever unfolding thing that we’re always on.” 

Active until the end

Whittaker skied until 87 and was a familiar figure walking his dog around the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in his hometown of Port Townsend well into his 90s.

“He didn’t let his age and fear of getting hurt stop him from doing what he loved,” son Leif Whittaker said. 

Added Christopher Kennedy, one of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children: “He was not somebody who stood apart as a god, but somebody who saw himself as a conduit between us and nature.”

Big Jim chronicled his heterogeneous experiences in “A Life on the Edge, Memoirs of Everest and Beyond” (Mountaineers Books, 1999). 

By the time he reached the summit of Everest, Whittaker had built a reputation as one of the country’s most experienced mountain climbers with his identical twin, Lou Whittaker, who died in 2024 at age 95.

Jim Whittaker’s ability to speak poetically about the ’63 Everest expedition helped bring the mountains into the American living room. He inspired legions to become mountaineers, including Leif, the youngest of five sons. 

“Seldom do you have one person epitomize the most admired, treasured and inspiring value of a whole state and that’s what Jim Whittaker does,” said former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, one of the climber’s many political friends.

1963 expedition brought fame — and tragedy

Whittaker’s vivid descriptions of the dangers of climbing Everest in 1963 brought terrifying details to life, particularly the saga of crossing a 2,000-foot-high maze of broken glacial ice called the Khumbu Icefall.

“The icefall is a living, moving, groaning, white fang homicidal mass of glacial debris,” he wrote of the route just beyond base camp.

The team lost climber Jake Breitenbach, of Jackson Hole, WY., on the second day while building a route over the icefall. Breitenbach and his climbing partners, who survived, got knocked off course by a block of ice as big as two railroad cars. 

The expedition continued despite the incident. After more than a month of slowly moving up the South Col route, Whittaker and Sherpa Nawang Gombu left Camp VI for the summit early on May 1 in a blizzard. 

They fought through a whiteout with 60-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures dropping to minus-30. 

“I didn’t know what was happening below,” Whittaker told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2005. “Do you go up or down? All I knew was what I had to do. We wanted to summit so bad. You can see how people die.” 

The climbers stumbled to the top, some seven hours after leaving the high-altitude camp. They had no more bottled oxygen. Whittaker’s two water bottles had frozen. He recalled suffering frostbite in one eye. Whittaker planted an American flag and posed for what would become an indelible image of the pioneering spirit with the climber holding a wooden ice ax.

“It wasn’t sublime or a moment of clarity,” Whittaker said in 2010. “I just suddenly thought, we’ve got to get down.”

The climb’s enduring lesson: humility

The descent to Camp VI in hurricane-force gales proved risky. Whittaker wrote that they had not gone far when an entire summit-ridge cornice directly before him slid off into Tibet. “There was no noise; the roaring wind drowned out any other sound,” he wrote. “I stared dumbfounded at the gigantic hole in front of me.”

Whittaker and Gombu became the 10th and 11th climbers to successfully summit, following the route of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s landmark ascent in 1953. In their wake, some 7,300 climbers have ascended to the highest point on the planet. The two also became lifelong friends.

Whittaker recalled not feeling special sitting atop the world. 

“I felt only, as I said later, like a frail human being,” he wrote. “The mountain is so huge and powerful, and the climber so puny, exhausted, and powerless. The mountain is forever; Gombu and I, meanwhile, were dying every second we lingered.”

At his death, Whittaker was the last surviving member of the 1963 expedition, which involved 19 climbers and cost more than $400,000. The group carried 27 tons of food and equipment, and had about 900 porters and 32 Sherpas. 

In all, six U.S. climbers reached the summit, including Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, who performed the historic first traverse of an 8,000-meter (26,246-foot) peak. The men climbed the technically challenging West Ridge route of sheer cliffs and had to spend a night without oxygen at 27,900 feet. Unsoeld eventually lost nine toes to frostbite. 

They survived, just as Whittaker had in his lifelong pursuit of peaks, often alongside his accomplished brother, the co-founder of guide service Rainier Mountaineering, Inc.

Whittaker twins took climbing world by storm

Born on Feb. 10, 1929, the West Seattle boys discovered their love of the mountains while living along Puget Sound, surrounded by the Olympic and Cascade ranges. 

They began honing their outdoor skills as members of Boy Scout Troop 272. Then they became regular fixtures of Seattle’s famed Mountaineers Club (now known simply as The Mountaineers), learning technical skills in rock and alpine climbing.

The Whittakers’ climbing prowess grew through their years at Seattle University, where Jim played on the basketball team while earning a degree in biology and a minor in philosophy. The brothers belonged to the National Ski Patrol, worked as professional guides on Mount Rainier and joined the Northwest Mountain Rescue and Safety Council.

While in the military after graduating from college, the Whittakers taught skiing and mountaineering to Special Forces troops in the Colorado Rockies as part of the Army’s Cold Weather Training Command.

Jim Whittaker “is one of those guys who created what we know about Northwest climbing,” said Ed Viesturs, the first American to reach the world’s 14 highest peaks without supplemental oxygen. “He lived a very full life, something you aspire to do personally.”

Two years after Whittaker’s Everest exploit, the National Geographic Society asked him to lead an expedition on 13,095-foot Mount Kennedy in Canada’s Southwest Yukon Territory. The unclimbed peak had been renamed in honor of the U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated a half year after the ‘63 Everest climb.

Whittaker led the slain president’s brother, Sen. Bobby Kennedy, to become the first climber to reach the summit. The experience cemented a close friendship between Whittaker and Kennedy. Soon, Whittaker’s family vacationed with the Kennedys on ski and rafting trips.

“He didn’t think of Bobby Kennedy and the Kennedy family as big-deal celebrities,” said Dianne Roberts, Whittaker’s second wife. “They were just his friends.”

Christopher Kennedy recalled Whittaker being a mythical figure at the family home or on vacations. When one of the kids balked at climbing a tree, scaling a wall or jumping off a boat the rest of the siblings called it the “Whittaker Challenge.”

The challenges “made me and my brothers and sisters more accomplished, more confident and all-around better people,” Kennedy said.

Big Jim became the Washington state campaign manager during Bobby Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential run in 1968. 

Whittaker recalled holding his friend’s hand in Los Angeles when Kennedy died from an assassin’s bullet after winning the California primary. Whittaker served as a pallbearer at services for the prominent politician. 

Climbing became his business — Seattle’s, too

Whittaker proved as adept in business as in the Cascades. He became REI’s first full-time employee in 1955 when the store, known as the Co-op, was located in an accountant’s office above the Green Apple Pie Shop in Seattle. The climbing gear outlet was strategically located across the hall from the Mountaineers clubhouse.

In 1971, he became REI’s second president and chief executive officer. Whittaker wrote that sales increased to $10 million in his first year as CEO.

The success of business and mountaineering took a toll on his family life, which included three boys. He and his first wife divorced before the REI promotion in 1971.

Whittaker took a leave from REI’s leadership four years later to attempt to put the first American on the summit of 28,250-foot K2. The world’s second-tallest peak is considered more technically difficult than climbing Everest. The 1975 expedition, which included Whittaker’s wife Dianne, failed because of issues with porters, bad weather and a breakdown among team members, he wrote.

The Whittakers arranged another attempt in 1978. This time, Louis Reichardt, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, climbing with Seattle lawyer Jim Wickwire, became the first Americans to summit the Pakistani peak. Two other Americans also successfully climbed it.

Whittaker’s life changed course after the K2 success. He announced his retirement at REI’s board meeting in December 1978, shortly after the expedition.

By then, Whittaker and Roberts had become accomplished ocean sailors, turning their attention to the wilderness of the sea.

The couple and sons Joss and Leif relocated from West Seattle to a parcel in Port Townsend in the 1980s. They built a 6,000-square-foot home their friends dubbed the “Taj Macabin.”

“Some of my earliest memories were building that gigantic log cabin and having this forest and beach surrounding us,” Joss Whittaker said. “Dad and Mom let Leif and I grow up as free-range children.”

A summit for peace

Everest called Big Jim back to the Himalayas in 1990 for another adventure. This time, it had nothing to do with climbing history. Whittaker and Roberts organized the Earth Day 20 International Peace Climb to promote friendship among the superpowers.

It took all of Whittaker’s gentle diplomacy to persuade Chinese and Russian officials to agree to the effort.

“This was before glasnost, before perestroika, before the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, before Gorbachev went to Beijing,” Whittaker wrote in a 1991 essay. “We would hold the summit of all summit meetings, enemies becoming friends.”

Whittaker displayed masterful leadership to keep the climbers united, recalled Viesturs, one of the Americans chosen for the expedition.

Whittaker, who did not attempt to summit, helped 21 climbers reach the top of the world. He also organized a cleanup of 2 tons of garbage left by other expeditions. 

“There is something about Jim that causes people to want to do things for him,” Roberts said. “If he even suggests that he wants to do something, people more or less line up to make it happen.”

Former U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the younger brother of John and Robert Kennedy, called Whittaker America’s first high-altitude diplomat. 

Inslee, Washington’s governor from 2013 to 2025, described feeling bittersweet when reflecting on the peace climb. 

“It sure would be great to think somehow that magic that Jim brought to that moment could be restored, given what’s going on in Ukraine,” he said. “His view of the world is contemporary; it’s not historical. It’s something that still exists.”

An environmental legacy

Whittaker also used his celebrity to promote environmental issues, recalled the Mountaineers Club chief executive Tom Vogl.

“I remember him speaking so elegantly about the connection of experiencing the outdoors and developing a love of place and developing a conservation ethic,” Vogl said. “It was so deeply rooted in his life and the way he went about experiencing the natural world.”

Will Dunn, REI’s historian, recalled how Whittaker advocated for saving forests and wilderness to help grow the outdoor industry at a time timber barons argued for logging.

As early as 1968, Whittaker testified in Congress for the creation of North Cascades National Park and the Pasayten Wilderness in Washington state, along with Redwood National Park in northern California.

Whittaker helped inculcate a wilderness ethic at REI and advanced the Leave No Trace movement that has become part of common vernacular in the outdoor industry. 

“What he started is so deeply embedded in our DNA that we don’t understand the impact of that work today,” Dunn said. “Now it is a muscle reflex.”

Inslee credited Whittaker for getting state lawmakers to create some of the country’s most conservation-minded policies. 

“Anything that I was able to do as governor when it came to protecting orcas and the glaciers and the fish stems from his opening the natural world to Washingtonians,” said Inslee, who has an autographed photo of Whittaker atop Everest.

Six years after the peace climb, Whittaker and Roberts were reinventing themselves again. The couple bought a 53-foot steel-hulled ketch named Impossible. They took sons Joss, then 13, and Leif, 11, out of school to sail to Australia and back. The family lived on the sailboat for about four years while traveling almost 20,000 miles.

Whittaker wrote in his memoir: “Here’s what I’ve learned so far. First, risk is an inherent part of a life well lived. It’s a prerequisite. If you stick your neck out, whether it’s climbing mountains or speaking up for something you believe in, your odds of winning are at least 50-50.”

Whittaker never stopped believing it.

“What would memorialize Jim the most is if people took inspiration from him to go out in their own lives and take a little risk now and then, and get to know nature,” Roberts said.

A half century later, still climbing

In 2012, at age 82, he trekked to just below Mount Everest base camp (elevation 17,598 feet) almost a half-century after the notable ascent. The final visit to his old friend had special resonance because Leif Whittaker was making his second Everest climb. But Big Jim got sick and had to be evacuated by helicopter, Roberts recalled.

“I can imagine that Jim would want all of us to remember not his last day but his best day,” said Arnot Reid, the renowned Everest guide who was part of the 2012 trek.

She said her best days were sharing the trail with Whittaker. Reid, 41, got to witness his deep love for a place she was just getting to know.

She cherished the rare chance to spend time with a history maker in his element, but who also showed respect for her accomplishments after learning to guide on Mount Rainier with the Whittaker family.

In the middle of the two-week trek, at an elevation of 12,500 feet, just below Tengboche Monastery, Big Jim stopped to admire the Himalayan countryside, Leif Whittaker recounted.

After a brief moment of contemplation, Jim Whittaker turned to his fellow trekkers, smiled, and took a deep breath of thin air. 

“Every step is health, fun and frolic!” he bellowed.

Whittaker died at home in a bed with a sweeping view of the region he loved: the Olympic Mountains, Port Townsend Bay, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, said his son, Leif, who added that the family was pleased to see Whittaker pass gently at the finish line of “a remarkable life.”

Whittaker is survived by wife Dianne Roberts of Port Townsend; sons Joss Whittaker of Olympia, Leif Whittaker of Port Townsend and Robert Whittaker of Spokane; grandchildren Adam and Anthony Whittaker and Sarah Kanzler; and great-granddaughter Sophie Whittaker. He was preceded in death by former wife Blanche Montbroussous and sons Carl Bernard Whittaker of Hilo, Hawaii and James Scott Whittaker of Kihei, Hawaii.

Memorials in Jim Whittaker’s name can be made to The Mountaineers (mountaineers.org/donate),  the Northwest Maritime Center (nwmaritime.org/support/give/donate-now) or Hospice Foundation for Jefferson Healthcare (hospicefoundationjhc.org/how-we-help).

The family will announce a celebration of life event at a later date.