In 1963, Swiss mountaineer Norman Dyhrenfurth invited the Whittaker brothers to join him on an Everest expedition. Lou was unable to make the trip, but Jim leapt at the chance. In his 1999 autobiography A Life on the Edge he describes how it felt to stand atop Everest: 'I did not feel expansive or sublime. I felt only, as I said later, 'like a frail human being'. People, mostly non-climbers talk about conquering mountains. In my mind, nothing could be farther from the truth. The mountain is so huge and powerful, and the climber so puny, exhausted, and powerless. The mountain is forever. Gombu and I, meanwhile, were dying every second we lingered.'
Summitting Everest changed Jim Whittaker's life. An invitation to the White House led to a friendship with the Kennedy family and in particular with Bobby Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother and Attorney-General. Following the president's assassination, Whittaker guided Bobby Kennedy to the top of the Yukon mountain named in the president's memory.
Whittaker went on to lead expeditions to K2, organizing the first American team to summit the mountain in 1978. In 1990 he surmounted physical and bureaucratic hurdles to place a combined U.S-Chinese-Russian team at the summit of Everest as part of the 1990 Mount Everest Earth Day International Peace Climb.
Today Jim Whittaker spends his time lecturing, writing and, when time allows, sailing with his wife Dianne Roberts, and their two teenage sons. Life, Whittaker says, is still full of adventure: 'I think a life well lived is also inseparable from being able and willing to learn continuously. A climber who doesn't learn, almost with every foothold and handhold, is unlikely to be around long enough to have a life well lived. Learning is what happens when you risk a journey beyond what you know and are comfortable with, to something you don't know and aren't comfortable with. A lot of people my age act like they've seen it all and have nothing much else to learn. But I'm still a learner.
