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A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond, Anniversary Edition
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About A Life On The Edge: Memoirs Of Everest And
An Interview with Jim Whittaker, April 30, 2013 Jon Foro: You were specifically picked for the Everest team due to your Mt. Rainier experience. Did that prepare you the way you thought it might? Jim Whittaker: I guided on Rainier through college, for three summers, and I climbed a lot, and I was on the ski patrol. So I'd done a lot of different things in the outdoors. (On McKinley, we had an accident--one of our team got a broken ankle and it took us a while to get down. I meant to ask Norman [Dyhrenfurth, the expedition leader] whether that was what really drew his attention, because it was on nation-wide news that we were stranded on the summit of Mt. McKinley.) Yeah, it did, it did. The thing is, the Northwest has got the glaciers. The East Coast, The middle states, even the Rockies don't have the glaciers. But here, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, they've got snow and ice--everything that Mount Everest has except that extra fourteen thousand feet. We have the crevasses, the seracs, we've got the weather--incredibly bad weather could hit.... So it was a great training ground. So I went over fairly confident--maybe overconfident--that we could knock off the mountain. JF: How much more intense was it once you got there? You mention the irony is that the hardest part of climbing Everest--from the South anyway--is the Khumbu Icefall. [If a glacier is a frozen river, then the icefall is a cataract in freeze-frame--except when it's not. 10-story blocks of ice, called seracs, frequently—and utterly unpredictably—tumble free.] JW: Yeah, from Nepal, exactly. The icefall that the whole team had to get through. This is an objective danger over which you have no control. You don't know when that wall's going to come off, when the glacier's going to move. You look at it and you think, “This is crazy.” Any sane mountaineer would ne
