Some people climb mountains. And some people are mountains, steady, generous, full of life, and quietly shaping the landscape around them. Jim Whittaker, who died on April 7, 2026, at the age of 97, was one of the mountains.
This month marks forty-five years since I first met him. I was nineteen years old, blind since the age of five, and a student at Whitman College who had just been invited to do something that sounded, frankly, impossible: climb the highest peak in Washington State.
The Man, and the Mountains He Climbed
By 1981, Jim Whittaker was already an American legend. In 1963, he had become the first American to stand on the summit of Mount Everest, climbing alongside the Sherpa Nawang Gombu. He was the first full-time employee of REI, the Seattle cooperative he would later lead as chief executive. He went on to lead the first American ascent of K2, and, in 1990, the Mount Everest International Peace Climb that brought together climbers from the United States, the Soviet Union, and China.
But here is what I came to understand about Jim: the summit he spoke of with the most pride was not the highest one. It was a glaciated volcano in our own backyard, climbed in the summer of 1981 with a team most of the world had quietly written off.
Project Pelion: How I Met a Mountain
That summer was the United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons, and a climber named Philip Bartow had an idea worthy of the occasion. Through his Institute for Outdoor Awareness, Bartow assembled Project Pelion: twelve people with disabilities, paired with twelve of the most accomplished mountaineers in the country, with one audacious goal, the 14,410-foot summit of Mount Rainier. The name came from Greek myth, the mountain the gods stacked as a stepping stone to the heavens.
Our team included climbers who were blind, climbers who were deaf, a Vietnam veteran who had lost a leg, and others living with conditions the world treated as disqualifying. Among the organizers was Dr. Judith Oehler, the first blind person to complete an Outward Bound course. Serving as our chief guide was Jim Whittaker, the dean of American mountaineering himself.
I met Jim and his wife, the photographer Dianne Roberts, as the team gathered to train near Aspen, Colorado. From those first days on, I was treated as exactly what I was, a member of the rope team, there to climb and not to be carried.
We very nearly did not go at all. Only days before our ascent, an avalanche of ice swept eleven climbers to their deaths on Rainier, the worst mountaineering accident in American history to that point. The mountain closed. When it reopened, our team voted, together, to continue, knowing we would cross the very ground where those climbers had fallen.
What Jim Did on Rainier
The climb was everything a mountain can be: glacier travel, hidden crevasses, walls of frozen snow, and air that thinned with every step. On summit day, our rope teams worked upward through the cold until, at last, there was no more up. I became the first blind person to stand on the summit of Mount Rainier. We spent about ninety minutes on top, ninety minutes I have carried with me for forty-five years, and we signed the register the way climbers always have. Somewhere in the wind, Jim let loose the booming “moose call” that no one who climbed with him ever forgot.
People sometimes assume that a guide gets a blind man to a summit by carrying him. Jim did not carry me up that mountain. He believed I belonged there. That single distinction has shaped everything I have done since.
The descent nearly undid us. Near Disappointment Cleaver, a section of the glacier broke loose above our rope teams, and for a few seconds the mountain reminded us exactly what it was. We came through. That summer, on that mountain, not everyone did.
A Harbor in Stormy Waters
When we came down, the world paid attention. We were welcomed to the White House by President Reagan. Jim and Dianne brought me to lunch at the home of Senator Ted Kennedy. And in the years that followed, when my wife and I needed one, Jim and Dianne handed us the key to the guest house behind their home in West Seattle, a harbor in stormy waters at a time when we did not have many.
Of the climbers he guided up Rainier, Jim said simply that “that was Mount Everest.” Coming from the first American to climb the real one, I have never heard a more generous sentence. It told me everything about how Jim measured a life. Greatness isn’t just about what you conquer. It’s about who you bring with you.
Why Project Pelion Still Matters
Project Pelion happened nearly a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. No mandate compelled anyone to rope a blind teenager to a glacier. We climbed because a small group of people decided, in public and at altitude, that disability is not the same thing as inability.
I have spent the four decades since making that same argument in rooms far warmer than Rainier, as a nonprofit CEO, as a consultant, and as an advocate. The lesson is the one Jim taught on the mountain. Inclusion is not charity, and it is not carrying anyone. It is believing that people belong, and then building the rope teams, the workplaces, and the systems that prove it. Done well, it lifts everyone on the line. Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s a strategic advantage.
Footprints in Hearts
Jim Whittaker stood on the highest point on Earth. He led the first American team up K2. He carried a message of peace to Everest. But ask me what made him great, and I will point to a 14,410-foot mountain in Washington and to a nineteen-year-old who could not see the summit beneath his own boots.
Some people leave footprints on summits. Jim left them in hearts.
To Dianne and the entire Whittaker family: thank you for sharing him with us. And to everyone reading this, I will offer the only mountaineering advice I have. Find someone the world has counted out, and bring them with you. That, in the end, is why we climbed the mountain.
With gratitude,
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here
American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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