KATHMANDU: Jim Whittaker, who on May 1, 1963, became the first American to stand atop Mount Everest, died on Tuesday at his home in Port Townsend, Washington. He was 97.

Whittaker reached the summit alongside Sherpa Nawang Gombu — a nephew of Tenzing Norgay — as part of the American Mount Everest Expedition led by Norman Dyhrenfurth. The two ran out of oxygen near the top but pressed on to complete the ascent, a decade after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first recorded summit in 1953. For the achievement, Whittaker was awarded the Hubbard Medal by President John F. Kennedy.

He was 34 at the time. His Washington state licence plate — 29028, the then-accepted height of Everest in feet — spoke to how completely that single day came to define a life.

Born in Seattle on February 10, 1929, ten minutes before his twin brother Lou, Whittaker began climbing with the Boy Scouts as a teenager. At 16, the brothers summited Mount Olympus in the Olympic Mountains. He went on to scale Mount Rainier more than 100 times and was part of expeditions to K2, the world's second-highest peak.

Among his proudest moments, Whittaker said, was leading ten climbers with disabilities up 14,410-foot Mount Rainier in 1981. "For them," he said, "that was Mount Everest."

Beyond mountaineering, Whittaker was the first full-time employee of outdoor retailer REI, eventually rising to president and CEO. His 1963 Everest summit helped ignite both popular interest and a commercial industry around mountaineering in the United States.

He released his autobiography, A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond, in 1999. His son Leif, who later summited Everest himself, published his own memoir in 2016 recounting that climb alongside comparisons to his father's experience.

Whittaker is survived by his wife of 52 years, Dianne Roberts; sons Bob, Joss, and Leif; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.