Big Lou has passed at 95

[olyclimber]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/2024/03/27/mountaineer-everest-rainier-jim-whittaker/af7007b4-ec92-11ee-8f2c-380a821c02db_story.html

[Bronco]

Kind of strange the text in the link says "jim-whittaker".  Made me check the article again.  

Crazy they both made it to 95.

Edited March 28 by Bronco

[olyclimber]

Never heard this before, seems like something everyone should know about:

 

Quote

The first time Jim and Lou Whittaker summited Mount Rainier, they both threw up. The twins were 16-year-old Boy Scouts in the summer of 1945, ascending via the Emmons Glacier with a few dozen others in the Seattle-based Mountaineers club. The sky was clear, but the two-day slog was harder than they expected. The underprepared boys were so dehydrated they melted snow in their mouths. Air is thin at 14,410 feet, and nausea is common “at elevation,” as climbers say. 

But what happened next is still disputed some 67 years later.

 

“Mom had packed a bunch of grapes, and you’re so thirsty up there,” says Lou Whittaker, now 83. “I threw up the grapes, re-ate a few of them.” Gross, yes, but he was a teenage boy. 

But Jim, his older-by-10-minutes brother, won’t confirm it, “You can’t believe everything Louie says. He wants to make a good story, and those are good stories.” In his own biography, in fact, Lou wrote that the gross anecdote was a “story [that] got around…but that’s not true.”

 

[astrov]

I'm a big fan of his memoir. I have too many books and it's survived many purges:

Memoirs of a Mountain Guide.

Here's to a life well-lived!

Edited May 29 by astrov