PAT NEAL: You don’t conquer a mountain

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 15, 2026

THERE WERE GIANTS in the land. We lost one last week when Jim Whittaker passed away at age 97 at his home at Port Townsend.

Whittaker was the first American to reach the summit of the 29,028-foot Mount Everest in 1963.

The image of Whittaker standing on the summit holding an American flag became a source of national pride that was only matched when Neil Armstrong stepped on the surface of the moon in 1969.

Climbing Everest was a lot like landing on the moon except as astronaut John Glen said: “Whittaker didn’t make a chimpanzee go first.”

These two events were part of the rising tide of the post-WWII era that made people proud to be Americans. It was a prosperous and traumatic time when the news was filled with riots, assassinations and war.

Whittaker and Armstrong showed Americans that they could do whatever they set their minds to.

Mountain climbing was cheaper than space travel.

That must be why our family decided to go backpacking for our summer vacations.

That was in the good old days, when children were used as pack stock for family outings.

We geared up at Jim Whittaker’s co-operative outdoor equipment store REI, with backpacks, sleeping bags and waffle-stompers and hit Olympic Mountain trails. Never dreaming one day I would meet Jim Whittaker.

I crashed a charity oyster bake for the Mar Vista Student Longboat Team at the Maritime Center in Port Townsend in 2010. Which I thought might have a bounty on this journalist’s head after unraveling the dirty linen from the seamy underbelly of the wooden boat cabal — where I exposed the inconvenient truth that wooden boats are made of wood, made from trees cut by loggers.

I promised never to return to Port Townsend, unless it was for oysters.

There, I saw Jim Whittaker sitting at a table alone.

I worked up my courage enough to thank Mr. Whittaker for saving my life.

“How did I do that?” He asked.

I told him how I went to REI to buy a canoe and he didn’t have any. We hit it off.

As a journalist, I had many questions like, “Which way to the oysters?”

After inhaling a bushel or so, we got heavy into the pineapple seltzer. I asked him about the good old days, when he guided mountain climbers on Mount Rainier.

“Did you serve oysters?” I asked.

No, he cooked instant oatmeal, otherwise known as mountain glue, for breakfast after getting his clients up at 1 in the morning to climb the mountain.

“You don’t conquer a mountain any more than you can conquer a river,” Whittaker said. “The mountain lets you climb. The river lets you float down it. You have to have respect for them. Conquer is a word the journalists use.”

Still, I had to ask how an American icon fell in with the wooden boat bunch.

“It’s part of a program called ‘No Child Left Inside,’” Whittaker said. “Kids around here are surrounded by water, but they have very few chances to go out on it.”

The Mar Vista Student Longboat Team let kids row an exact replica of a long boat out on the salt chuck from Port Townsend to the San Juan Islands and back.

Longboats are seaworthy.

You can sail or row with a crew of eight or 10. They were used by Captain Vancouver in 1792 to explore, map and name our local waters.

Student longboat teams learned history by reliving it.

That was Jim Whittaker’s way of providing inspiration to future generations to go adventuring.

We will miss him.

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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.

He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.