SEATTLE — Jim Whittaker, who in 1963 became the first American to reach the top of Mount Everest, has died. He was 97.
Whittaker’s 1963 ascent to the summit of Mount Everest came 10 years after Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay first scaled the peak.
Whittaker died Tuesday at his home in Port Townsend, Washington, according to a statement from his family.
His Mount Everest feat made the once-shy, rangy climber an instant celebrity, in demand for public appearances and expected to lend his support to good causes.
And it gained him entree into the world of celebrities, including the inner circles of the Kennedy clan. He became a close friend of Robert Kennedy, with whom he climbed a 14,000-foot Canadian peak named Mount Kennedy after the 1968 presidential contender’s assassination.
Whittaker, who had been state chairman for Kennedy’s campaign, was devastated by his death.
Bobby Kennedy was “one of the grittiest little guys you’ve ever seen,” the 6-foot-5 Whittaker once remarked. “It’s not how big you are but how tight you are wound that counts.”
Whittaker’s career on the mountain slopes began when he took on the Washington’s Olympic Mountains as a Boy Scout, and he once reflected that the beauty and danger of his sport sharpened the senses.
“You’re in nature, participating in God’s creation ... it’s such a high, such a spiritual thing,” Whittaker said in a 1981 interview.
“I think it’s good to participate in that and to face life,” he added. “When you live on the edge, you can see a little farther.”
The risks are part of the game.
“The mountains are fair, but they really don’t care,” Whitaker noted in 1987.
His achievements on the remote, snowy slopes of Mount Everest and nearby K2, the world’s second-tallest peak, assured him a niche in the record books. He shared world-class climber status with his identical twin, Lou, who led the first American expedition to scale Mount Everest’s north face.
Lou Whittaker died in 2024 at age 95.
But Jim Whittaker himself said one of his proudest moments came in 1981, when he led 10 handicapped climbers up 14,410-foot Mount Rainier. For them, he said later, “that was Mount Everest.”
Whittaker scaled Mount Rainier more than 100 times but did not take its familiar flanks for granted. The caprices of the weather, even on a comparatively modest mountain, “can turn a good climber into a beginner” in a matter of hours, he once noted.
And after years of risk on the world’s most dizzying pinnacles, Whittaker said in a 1980 interview that he hoped to “die in my sleep with the television on.”
In recent years, Whittaker was one of many climbers who resisted the idea of requiring climbers to wear electronic locators in some circumstances. Such a proposal was made for climbers on Oregon’s Mount Hood, where more than 35 climbers had 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 a lot away from the mystique of climbing.
“If you take all of the risk out of life, you lose a lot. You’re removing a personal liberty from somebody who wants to go and explore without having a safety net,” Whittaker said by cellphone from Idaho, where he was on a climbing trip. “You want to go into the wild and enjoy nature and not be followed.”
