Ascents nonetheless contain planning, preparation and willpower for Jim Whittaker, arguably probably the most well-known American climber of the twentieth century: first American to summit Mount Everest, vacationer with presidents, first paid full-time worker of REI, after which the co-op’s second CEO.
However at 96, the size of the climbs has modified. At the moment’s problem: the 17 stairs from Whittaker’s basement to the principle flooring of his Port Townsend, Washington, residence, the place visitors await to listen to him share tales of his mountaineering adventures.
“You prepared, Jim?” says Dianne Roberts, his spouse of fifty years. Locking her arm in his—a climber’s three-points of contact nonetheless in play—they start the march to the household room with its panoramic view of the Puget Sound, so he can inform his larger-than-life story yet another time.
A Childhood Exterior
Whittaker was born in Seattle on Feb. 10, 1929. Twin brother, Louie, adopted a couple of minutes later. Within the Whittaker family, solely the eldest, Barney, was referred to as by his given identify. Jim and Louie have been merely “the Twins.” “We have been inseparable,” Whittaker tells Unusual Path.
In 1931, the Whittakers’ mother and father, Hortense and Charles, moved the younger household to the West Seattle neighborhood after constructing a two-bedroom home for $350 on loads with a view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. Charles and Hortense liked the outside. Household journeys typically concerned tenting with the boys within the Cascades or on a seashore close to the sound. To the twins, West Seattle appeared like the sting of civilization. They explored close by groves or the seashore. They joined the Boy Scouts.
“Again then, there was hardly a greater place to be a Boy Scout than Seattle,” Whitaker writes in his ebook, A Life on the Edge. “Out the entrance door we had the Olympic Mountains and out the again door, the Cascades.” (Their troop as soon as acquired so misplaced that it returned residence practically a day late, to panicked mother and father.) These experiences would form the course of each boys’ lives.
Climbing Adventures
By the Fifties, now of their late teenagers, all three brothers moved from the Boy Scouts to the Mountaineers Membership, the place they realized mountain climbing and alpine climbing.
The fun—and peril—of their new pastime got here to a head for the trio sooner or later above Snoqualmie Cross, on a climb referred to as the Tooth, a ceremony of passage for Seattle-area climbers even at this time. The Tooth isn’t an extended climb. The higher half is straightforward, with respectable handholds. Decrease down, although, climbers should inch round a nook to a ledge that’s lower than a foot huge. Under the ledge? A drop. “The hole lay in shadow. I stepped as much as its edge, started to maneuver out over it to the cliff just a few ft away, glanced down previous my left foot and…froze stable,” Whittaker remembers in his memoir, “The cliff plunged straight down for what seemed like 1,000 ft. I used to be terrified.”
The brothers accomplished the climb, however all three vowed by no means to climb one other mountain. Barney stored his promise. Jim and Louie “spent the remainder of our lives breaking it,” Whittaker writes. “That day, solely moments aside, we every crossed a niche inside ourselves and, within the course of, had been uncovered not simply to hazard however to our destinies.”
After school, and with the Korean Conflict raging, luck intervened to maintain Jim and Louie out of fight, which neither wished. (Each have been already within the Military.) Each had labored as climbing guides on Mount Rainier earlier than the conflict. The Military’s Chilly Climate Coaching Command at Camp Hale, Colorado (authentic residence of the tenth Mountain Division) wanted instructors to show particular forces troopers to ski, climb and navigate in snowy wilderness. Mates made an introduction, and the Military transferred the twins to Colorado to work as instructors.
Trying again years later, Whittaker says instructing these gung-ho troopers ready him to navigate large egos on worldwide climbing expeditions and within the company world.
Normal Supervisor of REI
In 1954, launched from the army, Whittaker picked up a name from Lloyd Anderson, a former climbing teacher who had identified him since his Boy Scouts days. The downtown Seattle cooperative that Anderson had co-founded with spouse Mary was then a climbing gear importer merely referred to as the co-op. It had grown to 600 members, and Anderson couldn’t sustain with demand. He wanted assist.
Whittaker grew to become the primary full-time paid worker of the co-op in 1955—incomes $400 a month, plus a bonus from gross sales. And so “started the twenty-four years through which he would achieve fame as the most important bum in Northwest mountaineering historical past, after which destroy issues by making bumming respectable,” writes writer and mountaineering advocate Harvey Manning in REI: 50 Years of Climbing Collectively.
The co-op occupied a tiny area on the nook of sixth Avenue and Pike Road. Throughout the corridor was the Mountaineers Clubhouse, which meant a gradual stream of shoppers who have been excited to deal with the brand new pitons and ice axes that had arrived from Europe. Whittaker started working organizing the 10-by-20-foot room. He created mailing lists and compiled a rolodex of drugs suppliers.
When the second full-time worker was employed six months later, the co-op added a ski store. Enterprise boomed. The corporate moved to bigger area and shortly modified its identify to Leisure Tools, Inc.
Rainier and Denali Ascents
In the meantime, Jim and Louie have been gaining reputations as distinctive mountaineering guides for the rising variety of poeple taking on mountaineering. Many got here for the pull of 14,411-foot Mount Rainier, virtually within the Whittakers’ yard. The height presents one thing for climbers of all skills with its crevasse fields, violent climate modifications, important publicity and chilly. In actual fact, it typically serves as a coaching floor for climbers eyeing Himalayan and Andean summits.
The brothers’ common Rainier ascents led in 1960 to a profitable expedition to Alaska’s Denali—North America’s tallest mountain. The journey didn’t go all easily; a big fall on the descent required one injured climber to be rescued by helicopter.
Nonetheless, the expedition helped put together Whittaker for a name that might come the next yr—one that might change his life.
The World’s Tallest Peak
By the early Sixties no American had made it to the highest of Mount Everest.
Swiss filmmaker Norman Dyhrenfurth contacted the Whittaker, hoping to recruit them for an Everest expedition. Louie declined the journey, whereas Jim grew to become an instrumental member of the group. (Louie, who based the climbing firm Rainier Mountaineering Inc., died in March 2024.)
Along with his REI experience, Jim chosen, organized and shipped tons of drugs for the four-month expedition. He additionally secured sponsorships from Seattle-based firms Eddie Bauer and Rainier Beer.
On Might 1, 1963, the group summited, with Whittaker reaching the highest alongside Sherpa Nawang Gombu.
At residence in Port Townsend, Whittaker reveals off a gold ring he nonetheless wears. It’s set with a easy, black, heart-shaped stone. He picked up the stone on Everest’s summit. When he returned to Seattle in 1963, he handed it to a jeweler. “I instructed [the jeweler] ‘Don’t lose that S.O.B otherwise you’re useless,’” Whittaker tells Unusual Path, laughing on the reminiscence.
However he did lose one thing after the journey: his anonymity. “Again then, everybody paid consideration to those climbs,” climber Ed Viesturs, tells Unusual Path. “It was a really nationalistic factor…. The president took discover,” says Viesturs, certainly one of a handful of individuals to summit the world’s 14 highest peaks and solely certainly one of few to take action with out supplemental oxygen.
“There was an enormous parade via the streets of Seattle with confetti and bands enjoying,” Whittaker writes in A Life on the Edge. “I used to be given keys to the town. I stored pondering, ‘Look, all we did was climb a mountain.’ (However) it started to daybreak on me that my life had modified eternally.”
REI additionally was turned the wrong way up, Manning writes in his ebook, as media retailers talked about the co-op together with Jim’s achievement; “the free promoting catapulted REI from obscurity to fame.”
Friendship with the Kennedys
A few month later, the climbing group, Sherpas included, met President John F. Kennedy on the White Home. The go to sparked a decade-long friendship between Whittaker and the Kennedy household.
In 1965, Whittaker guided Sen. Bobby Kennedy, the late president’s brother, to the summit of Mount Kennedy within the Yukon of Western Canada, a beforehand unclimbed peak named for JFK. Whittaker and Bobby grew to become shut pals. Their households typically vacationed collectively, taking snowboarding or rafting journeys. Whittaker chaired the Washington state marketing campaign for Bobby’s 1968 presidential bid. And Whittaker mourned with the household when Bobby was assassinated in 1968.
In the meantime, Whittaker continued climbing, operating REI, elevating three sons (Carl, Scott and Bobby), and drifting aside from his spouse, Blanche. His journey and really public life—Life Journal photograph spreads, enterprise journeys, Solar Valley ski journeys with the Kennedy clan and different celebrities—widened a gulf between them, he writes in his ebook. They divorced in 1971.
Second CEO of REI
By 1971, “after 15 years being groomed for the place,” in keeping with Manning, Whittaker had taken on duties as CEO.
At a 1972 assembly of the U.S. Nationwide Parks Board in Calgary, Whittaker heard a woman throughout the room in an animated dialog together with his pals. He walked over. “It was love at first sight,” he writes in his memoir. Roberts, an expert out of doors photographer, had the identical adventurous mindset as Jim. They have been engaged a yr later.
Roberts would turn out to be central to the subsequent stage of Whittaker’s profession: an American try and summit K2, the world’s second-tallest mountain. Climbers typically say that K2 and Annapurna are more durable to climb than Everest—with extra sophisticated approaches, unpredictable climate and perpetual avalanche hazard.
Whittaker’s 1975 expedition to K2, aided by Roberts as group member and official photographer, ended and not using a summit. Three years later, Whittaker led one other try. Though he didn’t attain the highest, climbers Jim Wickwire, an REI board member and a part of the 1975 expedition, and Lou Reichardt summited. It marked the third ascent of K2 and the primary by Individuals.
That profitable K2 summit partly led to his departure from REI in 1979, which had been constructing for years, he says. He felt disconnected from higher administration, who to him appeared extra in contact with commerce than the outside.
“I used to be shocked by the considerably chilly reception after I returned from our profitable assault on K2,” Whittaker writes in A Life on the Edge. “None of my board members climbed and as a consequence appeared in a position to recognize what our American group has achieved.” He retired from REI in 1979. Throughout his final decade at REI, the co-op grew from below 200,000 members to over 900,000 members.
Conservation Trailblazer
Whereas at REI, Whittaker led conservation efforts lengthy earlier than the co-op grew to become synonymous with actions like #OptOutside. He noticed a necessity for the co-op to guard the atmosphere.
Even earlier than he assumed the duties of CEO, he secured board approval in 1968 to testify in D.C. on behalf of REI for the creation of the North Cascades Nationwide Park and Pasayten Wilderness, each in Washington state, and Redwood Nationwide Park in California.
Below Whittaker’s management, the co-op organized cleanups and path enhancements; donated to environmental organizations; and promoted the message, “When you pack it in, pack it out” in its catalogs. Whittaker additionally personally advocated to guard wilderness areas and different wild locations, testifying at hearings in D.C. and in his residence state.
Retirement from REI didn’t imply slowing down. In 1990, he led the Everest Worldwide Peace Climb, uniting American, Soviet and Chinese language climbers. The Peace Climb was much less about mountaineering and extra about displaying the world that cooperation and collegiality weren’t useless. “On the Peace Climb, I acquired an opportunity to look at how good Jim was at these large-scale expeditions,” says Viesturs, then a younger information invited to work on the expedition. Logistics, politics, language limitations and egos sophisticated every little thing, he stated. Tensions grew. “Jim stepped in and have become the chief, as he usually did,” Viesturs tells Unusual Path. “He acquired everybody organized and he made it clear that members from each nation would summit, or nobody would summit.”
A Full Life
Again in Port Townsend, Whittaker talked about nonetheless extra tales—the interlocking items of what he referred to as his “full life.” He helped a blind climber attain the summit of Mount Rainier. He recounted a story a few late well-known astronaut who, after just a few drinks at a black-tie dinner, threatened to “moon” the viewers.
Whittaker wished to maintain going, however Roberts signaled it was time to wrap up. Twenty years his junior, she runs the routine of Jim’s life today. “He’s all the time pushed himself so laborious,” she says. “So it’s as much as me to remind him [when it’s time to rest].”
However Whittaker is aware of his lack of an off swap is, in essence, why he has a narrative to inform. “There’s nonetheless extra to say,” he says, with a smile. “I don’t suppose we’re completed fairly but.”
Associated articles:
- Scene From the Movie: ‘Return to Mount Kennedy’
- 40 Years Later: The Story Behind the First American Ascent of K2
- REI Historical past: It Began with an Ice Axe
The publish Jim Whittaker: Reflections from a Mountaineering Legend appeared first on Unusual Path – An REI Co-op Publication.