Feature Image: Jim Whittaker in Port Townsend, Washington, in 2002. Photo by Jim Herrington from The Climbers book
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By Michael Levy
When he heard the phone ring on May 1, 2022, then 93-year-old Jim Whittaker already knew who it was. Lifting the cell phone to his ear with a shaky hand, he answered in his jovial baritone. The phone’s volume was turned up to the max, Whittaker’s hearing having started failing in recent years.
A gravelly voice on the other end of the line came through. It was Tom Hornbein, 91, calling from his home in Estes Park, Colorado.
It was the same call that Hornbein had been delivering to Whittaker every May 1 for over 40 years—a congratulations on the anniversary of Whittaker becoming the first American to summit Everest, back in 1963. On that cold May day, Whittaker and his Nepali partner, Gombu Sherpa, had awoken at 4:00 a.m., not to placid skies and the stillness they had hoped for, but to roaring 60-mile-per-hour winds and near-whiteout conditions. They went up anyway.
“I fear Everest is the legacy for both of us,” Hornbein, who died in 2023, told me during an interview in 2022 for a never-published piece. After Whittaker’s Everest ascent, on that same 1963 expedition Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld went on to make the first ascent of Everest's West Ridge, a seminal climb in 20th century mountaineering rarely repeated to this day. “Once I’m gone, I don’t give a damn, so it’s okay,” Hornbein continued. “Unquestionably, though, that’s the main thing Jim will be remembered for, whether he likes it or not.”
Jim Whittaker died on Tuesday, April 7, at 97 years old. Wonderful obituaries have already been published in papers big and small, from The New York Times to Cascadia Daily News. I won’t rehash Jim’s life story here; those other articles do it quite well. Rather, his death has me reflecting on legacy, a friendship between two giants of mountain climbing, and, ultimately, a thoughtful, kind man.
It “did not occur to me that this was the moment around which the rest of my life would pivot,” Whittaker wrote in the preface to his 1999 autobiography, A Life on the Edge.
The effect was such that the rest of the highs—and lows—of Whittaker’s life, in climbing, business, and beyond, were comparatively overshadowed. From becoming CEO of REI and growing it into the name-brand outdoor store it is today, to sailing around the world with his family; from making the first ascent of Mt. Kennedy, named for the late president, with his good friend Robert Kennedy, to leading the Peace Climb (his self-professed proudest climbing achievement), a 1990 Everest expedition composed of American, Soviet, and Chinese climbers as a single team—1963 Everest outshone them all.
Being remembered above all for something you did when you were 34 is hard to comprehend. I’m 36; to think that what I do now, two years older than Whittaker was in 1963, might be the thing that follows me around for the rest of my days is a curious thought. In the back of my mind, I reflexively assume any great book I write, or any great climb I complete—should I be lucky enough to accomplish either—will come years down the line, the culmination of accumulated experiential wisdom and stumbles along the way.
But for Whittaker, each time he penned a new chapter, Everest had a way of burrowing through the past and asserting itself in his present.
With grace, humility, and wry humor, he accepted it.
Whittaker, center, on the 1990 Peace Climb expedition to Everest. / Photo courtesy of the Whittaker Family Photo Collection
During our Zoom interview in 2022, Whittaker was at home in Port Townsend, northwest of Seattle, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. He and his wife Dianne had lived there, looking out over Puget Sound, since 1984. Seated in a desk chair, Whittaker wore a dark-green zip-up fleece, with an American flag pin. His voice was whispery thin, his skin pale and papery. Dianne remained by his side for the entirety of our interview, in case Whittaker couldn’t hear me well enough and needed assistance. On the wall behind him were several framed pictures of K2 taken by Dianne, wooden oars from their sailing voyages around the world, and other paraphernalia from a life of adventure.
But of Everest? There were no photos, no mementos. Whittaker didn’t need them.
“You don’t forget that stuff,” he said. “It’s not like it was another life. It’s my present life. When I spill a stove, I remember the stove I spilled up on Everest with the soup in it. There are all kinds of things that keep it in my mind.”
In his tenth decade, Whittaker was all too aware that he’d only be getting so many more of those May 1 calls from Hornbein. (Whittaker would also call Hornbein each May 22, the anniversary of Hornbein and Unsoeld’s first ascent of the West Ridge. “And I always ask him, ‘Why did you wait so long to go up that mountain?!’” Whittaker told me, laughing.) Like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams outliving all but one other signer of the Declaration of Independence, Whittaker and Hornbein, the two most famous men from the 1963 expedition, were the last men standing. And that, in its own way, brought them closer than ever.
“I think we both feel quite a sense of being the last of the Mohicans,” Hornbein told me. “And that I think brings both of us very close to each other at this point. I’m sure each one of us is wondering which one of us will be next—and that will figure itself out whenever it’s ready to.” In their chats, they commiserated over the indignities of aging (“Jim and I have both given up our drivers' licenses now,” Hornbein said), but mostly took pleasure in simple conversation and sharing news of their large families, of which both were immensely proud. “We don’t talk a lot about the expedition,” Hornbein said. “Just normal stuff, nothing very profound.” (Generally they would “FaceTime with each others’ foreheads,” Dianne said.)
Of Hornbein, Whittaker simply told me, “He’s a sweetheart.”
By most any metric, Big Jim lived a full life. Between Dianne; his beloved twin brother (and fellow climber), Lou, who died in 2024; three children, as many grandchildren, and a great grandchild; and friends like Hornbein and others all across the world, by the end, Whittaker told me, Everest, central as it was to his life, had long since receded in importance. When I asked him if he had any regrets, he said yes, a few, of course, as anyone does. But too few to mention. And then he quoted the closing lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”:
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
And then he said, “I’m learning to yield. You kind of have to yield to life.”
Michael Levy is the editor in chief of Summit Journal.
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On Jim Herrington's The Climbers: Nearly twenty years in the making, The Climbers by photographer Jim Herrington shares a stunning collection of portraits of icons in mountaineering — from Beckey, Cassin, and Diemberger to Messner, Robbins, and Bonington, rugged individualists who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, used primitive gear along with their considerable wits, talent, and fortitude to tackle challenging climbs around the world.
