The Mount Everest Earth Day 20 Peace Climb: Wild Dreams and Steps to Reality

By Jake Page
Published on March 1, 1990
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In high spirits, Jim Whittaker in 1963 became the first American to reach Everest's summit, the highest point on Earth.
In high spirits, Jim Whittaker in 1963 became the first American to reach Everest's summit, the highest point on Earth.
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A team of climbers sizes up Mount Everest's north face. Looking tranquil in good weather, it will still test every climbing skill.
A team of climbers sizes up Mount Everest's north face. Looking tranquil in good weather, it will still test every climbing skill.
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During a training ascent of Mount Rainier in Washington State, a team of Everest Expedition climbers evaluates potential routes to the summit.
During a training ascent of Mount Rainier in Washington State, a team of Everest Expedition climbers evaluates potential routes to the summit.
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Wearing their Everest Expedition t-shirts, a pair of Chinese climbers begins a trek up to Rainier's base camp to further test their skills.
Wearing their Everest Expedition t-shirts, a pair of Chinese climbers begins a trek up to Rainier's base camp to further test their skills.
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Even at Rainier, climbers put the new cleanup ethic into practice. On the way down, sleds are loaded with debris-packed bags.
Even at Rainier, climbers put the new cleanup ethic into practice. On the way down, sleds are loaded with debris-packed bags.

Earth’s highest peak is mostly granite, often climbed, and badly littered as a result. But it is also still a pure symbol of reaching high. On Earth Day, a joint Russian-Chinese-American team will attempt the summit of Everest. This time, the symbolism will be more mixed. And richer. Peace and environment.  

Jim Whittaker: Expedition Leader

The thing about Jim Whittaker is not that he’s big, even though he was big even when he was little. It’s that he’s so damned strong. Somehow, forces such as gravity that challenge us every day net out as a bit weaker around Whittaker.

Once I visited him at a 40-foot-long cabin he had built out of tons of logs and driftwood he hauled up a cliff from the beach on the Washington coast. The cabin was slightly atilt on its pilings, so he simply jacked it up. All by himself. I looked around for a large blue ox.

Sports Illustrated was right when it gushed that Whittaker was America’s strongest mountaineer. That was in 1963, after he had stood on the 29,028-foot summit of Mount Everest, the first American to do so. That seems long ago. It was a year after Silent Spring was published, the same year that civil rights demonstrations erupted in the South, a “hot line” was established between Washington and Moscow, atmospheric nuclear tests were banned, and Kennedy was shot. Jim Whittaker’s achievement brought him fame in a time needing heroes. He was lionized: Americans had conquered Mount Everest. Indeed, had it not been for the Revolutionary War, Whittaker might well be known these days as Sir James.

But, as he wrote later, “We knew we had not conquered the mountain. Our team struggled for months. We had lost one man in an ice fall; others lost toes and fingers. We were survivors of the mountain. To claim we had conquered this monument of nature would have been flagrant arrogance, for there was no enemy up there to be conquered…no enemy but ourselves, our weaknesses and errors.”

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