Jim Whittaker, first American climber to scale Mt.

For 20 minutes of his life, Jim Whittaker was on top of the world.

He was the first American to summit Mt. Everest, reaching the best level on Earth on May 1, 1963, with Sherpa Nawang Gombu.

“We were standing in the jet stream, on the edge of space,” Whittaker wrote in his 1999 memoir, “A Life on the Edge.”

He returned home a hero, with his image on the duvet of Life magazine, a White House fete and sudden superstar. And though life off the mountain didn’t always go easily, he disdained remorse.

“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,” he wrote. “On the other hand, if you never stick your neck out, your odds of losing are pretty close to 100%.”

An adventurer until the end, Whittaker died Tuesday at his home in Port Townsend, Wash., his son Leif confirmed to the New York Times. Whittaker was 97. .

He was 34 when he scaled Everest, a feat that formed a lot of the remaining of his life. His Washington state license plate read 29028, the commonly accepted peak of Everest when he climbed it. (GPS surveys later put it at about 29,035 ft.)

He was chosen for the expedition by its chief, Swiss mountaineer Norman Dyhrenfurth, because of his expertise in climbing under icy circumstances, including quite a few summits of Mt. Rainier close to his Seattle-area home.

But Everest, first scaled in 1953 by New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was a far more formidable and harmful beast. And even if the Dyhrenfurth expedition was profitable, only a chosen few of its 19 crew members would attain the top. Still, Whittaker thought his possibilities have been good.

“I’d trained hard, put 60 pounds of bricks in my backpack,” he told National Geographic Adventure magazine in 2003. “I swam in Lake Sammamish in winter to build up to the cold we would encounter.

“I didn’t know anyone who was in better shape.”

On only the second day of the group’s climb from base camp, tragedy struck when a giant part of an icefall — a glacier formation resembling a frozen waterfall — shifted, crushing crew member Jake Breitenbach.

“I had told everyone back home that Everest was not a difficult climb technically; the only problem was the lack of oxygen and the weather,” Whittaker wrote in “Life on the Edge.” “Now it had killed one of us, and we’d only just begun.”

Because the only means to get back to base camp was via that icefall, Whittaker selected to keep above it on the mountain for 5 regular weeks as more camps have been established up Everest. He misplaced 25 kilos and a appreciable quantity of strength due to the skinny air.

Still, he was in better condition than many of the other climbers, and Dyhrenfurth selected him for the ultimate assault. He and Gombu left the last camp in the center of a windstorm, with a scant provide of oxygen.

How exhausting was it to breathe? “Put a pillow on your face, run around the block, and try and suck oxygen through that pillow,” he said. It was so cold, one of his eyeballs froze, making it unusable.

Reaching the summit after a number of hours, they stayed only long enough to take footage and plant flags as 50-mph winds whipped around them.

“When you are up there, you are not ecstatic, you are not afraid,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2013. “You’re really not anything. But in the back of your mind, you know one thing: You gotta get off. Half of the climb is getting up, the other half is getting down.”

James Whittaker was born on Feb. 10, 1929, in Seattle, about 10 minutes before the beginning of Louie, his twin brother. As the boys grew up, they took to roughhousing around the home, a lot to the chagrin of their mom.

“I believe that command to ‘Go outside and play’ is what started Louie and me on the path we have taken ever since,” Whittaker wrote.

He was energetic in Boy Scouts and as a teenager joined a mountaineering membership that sponsored climbs on the close by Olympic and Cascade ranges. He examined himself on more and more larger peaks, relishing moments such as breaking through cloud layers.

“I think nature is a great teacher,” he told the Seattle Times in 2013. “Being in nature that way is a good way to find out who the hell you are.”

After ending West Seattle High School, Whittaker went on to Seattle University, graduating in 1952. He was promptly drafted into the Army, but his mountaineering expertise led him to be assigned to the Mountain and Cold Weather Training Command in Colorado instead of fight obligation in Korea.

In 1955, he turned the first full-time worker of the Recreational Equipment Cooperative (later called REI) when it was housed in a 20-by-30-foot space above a Seattle restaurant. In his first yr, he expanded the co-op’s choices into ski tools and launched new ideas — such as opening on Saturday mornings so prospects might decide up tools for weekend journeys — that boosted gross sales.

Whittaker, pictured on April 12, 1975, in Seattle, exhibits some of the gear he can be taking for an expedition to climb K2 on the China-Pakistan border.

(Associated Press)

Because of his connection to the co-op, he was appointed tools coordinator of the Everest climb, and REI agreed to keep him on the payroll during the expedition.

In July 1963, he and other members of the Everest crew, including Gombu, have been introduced the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society — which partially sponsored the expedition — by President Kennedy, 4 months before the president was assassinated.

Two years later, Whittaker led a climb up Mt. Kennedy, a almost 14,000-foot Canadian peak named for JFK, with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in the climbing occasion. The two males solid a close friendship that prolonged to the broader Kennedy clan. In subsequent years, Whittaker went on ski holidays with the Kennedys, was a visitor at the household compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., and hosted gatherings in Seattle that included mountaineering.

Whittaker organized Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential marketing campaign efforts in the Pacific Northwest and spoke to him by telephone only minutes before the candidate was fatally shot in Los Angeles. Whittaker caught a flight to L.A. and was at the senator’s hospital bedside when he died and then served as a pallbearer at the funeral.

In mountaineering, Whittaker was carefully concerned in more high-profile ventures. He led a 1975 expedition up the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, that failed to attain the top. His return expedition in 1978 was profitable, though he selected not to go to the summit himself.

That same yr, he determined to give up REI, partly because of friction with the co-op’s board. He had been president and chief govt since 1971, and when he left, the co-op was a $46-million business with more than 700 workers.

Whittaker throws the ceremonial first pitch before a baseball recreation between the Mariners and the Angels in 2013.

(Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)

Income from an endorsement settlement helped keep him financially sound, but an investment in a new out of doors gear company proved to be a catastrophe. The financial irregularities of a accomplice, who was convicted of felony bank fraud, doomed the enterprise, and Whittaker was left holding the financial bag.

He was almost worn out but acquired back on his financial footing when a enterprise capitalist requested him in 1986 to be chairman of the board, with stock choices, of a new company called Magellan. It was a pioneer in GPS client electronics and holds quite a few patents in the sphere.

Appropriately, Whittaker called one of the chapters halfway through his ebook “Roller Coaster.” But he completed it with “Life Well Lived.”

“If you aren’t living on the edge,” he wrote, “you’re taking up too much space.”

Whittaker is survived by his spouse, Dianne Roberts, and youngsters Bobby, Joss and Leif.

Colker is a former Times workers author.