Jim Whittaker, first American climber to scale Mt. Everest, dies at 97
For 20 minutes of his life, Jim Whittaker was on top of the world. He was the first American to summit Mt. Everest, reaching the highest point on Earth on May 1, 1963, with Sherpa Nawang Gombu. “We were standing in the jet stream, on the edge of space,” Whittaker wrote in his 1999 memoir,…