“For 20 minutes of his life, Jim Whittaker was on top of the world,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
Whittaker and a fellow climber reached the highest point on earth – 29,032 feet – on May 1, 1963.
“We were standing in the jet stream, on the edge of space,” Whittaker wrote in his 1999 memoir, “A Life on the Edge.”
Whittaker’s climbing partner was Nawang Gombu, a Sherpa mountaineer and the first man in the world to have climbed Mount Everest twice.
After summiting Earth’s highest peak, Whittaker “returned home a hero, with his picture on the cover of Life magazine, a White House fete and unexpected celebrity,” the Times says.
“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,” Whittaker wrote. “On the other hand, if you never stick your neck out, your odds of losing are pretty close to 100 percent.”
An adventurer until the end, Whittaker died Tuesday at his home in Port Townsend, Wash., his son Leif told The New York Times.
Whittaker was 97.
In 1955, Whittaker became the first full-time employee of Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) and was the company’s CEO in the 1960s.
When he climbed Everest, it provided REI with so much free advertising that the following year, 1964, its gross income topped $1 million for the first time.
First American Climber To Scale Mt. Everest, World’s Highest Point, Dies at 97
By Ted Cohen
