PORT ANGELES — Leif Whittaker was completely out of breath and on the verge of passing out.
The 26-year-old Port Townsend man was two hours into a grueling push from high camp to the 29,029-foot summit of Mount Everest.
“I was breathing with intense depth and frequency, basically hyperventilating, but still nothing was getting in,” Whittaker told a crowd of more than 100 at the Peninsula College Little Theater on Tuesday.
“It was like I was suffocating.”
Whittaker realized the air valve in his oxygen mask was clogged with frozen spit.
He fixed his mask and pushed onward and upward, reaching the top of world May 25.
“Being there, feeling like I’m going to suffocate and being able to kind of overcome that and continue up the mountain was one of the hardest moments of the climb,” he recalled.
“And absolutely, it was the hardest thing I have ever done.”
Whittaker has made several speaking appearances about his Everest climb in Western Washington and Alaska since returning to Port Townsend.
Tuesday’s presentation, sponsored by the Hurricane Ridge Winter Sports Club, was his first in Port Angeles.
Attendees paid $20 in advance or $25 at the door. Proceeds went to the Hurricane Ridge Winter Sports Education Fund.
Whittaker showed dramatic slides and videos of his Everest ascent and earlier climbs on Mounts Vinson and Aconcagua, the highest points in Antarctica and South America, respectively, during the 90-minute event.
Whittaker is the son of legendary climber Jim Whittaker, who became the first American to summit Everest in 1963.
As Leif Whittaker was nearing the summit, he envisioned his father navigating the summit ridge with old-school equipment and a single Sherpa, the expert Nepalese climbers who help carry supplies and set up camps.
“I remember looking at it [Everest] and thinking he was crazy,” Leif Whittaker said.
“I gained so much respect for what he accomplished. I’m still in awe of what he did up there.”
Leif Whittaker described the complex emotions he felt during the half-hour he spent on the summit.
Most of all, he said, he felt gratitude to his teammates, their Sherpas, climbers of the past, his friends, family and, most of all, the mountain itself.
Whittaker had spent two days huddled in his tent at the 26,000-foot high camp waiting for the weather to improve.
His climbing team was running out of supplies, and the window for a summit push was closing fast.
“If the weather didn’t change in a matter of hours, we’d be forced to descend without even getting a single chance to go to the summit,” Whittaker said.
“I started getting really discouraged, and I started thinking about all the people who were following this climb: my community, all of you, the people I would be letting down if I didn’t get to the summit.”
Whittaker said a prayer, asking the mountain for one chance to go for the top.
After 20 minutes of rest, he opened his tent to clear skies, calm winds, reasonable temperatures and no crowds. Bottlenecks have killed dozens of climbers on Everest.
“I was so thankful that the mountain had given me that one chance that I asked for,” Whittaker said.
A native of the North Olympic Peninsula, Leif Whittaker first climbed 7,980-foot Mount Olympus at age 15.
One year later, he stood on top of 14,411-foot Mount Rainier, where his uncle, Lou Whittaker, and cousin, Peter Whittaker, are legendary climbers who run the main guide service.
Leif Whittaker opened his presentation by showing a helmet-cam video of himself backcountry-skiing with his friends at Hurricane Ridge.
“I grew up on the Olympic Peninsula, and I really learned to climb in the Olympic Mountains,” he said.
“But I didn’t discover Hurricane Ridge until this season, to be honest, and it’s totally changed my perspective on winters on the Olympic Peninsula.”
“It’s completely different. I don’t want the spring to come, honestly. I hope it keeps dumping snow for weeks,” Leif Whittaker said.
Whittaker thanked the Hurricane Ridge Winter Sports Club for sponsoring the event. He also thanked Eddie Bauer and First Ascent, the main sponsors of his Everest climb.
“Without their sponsorship, there’s no way I would have made it up there in 2010,” he said.
Whittaker detailed the team’s 10-day trek to base camp at Everest. They landed at a treacherous high-mountain airport, received blessings from a Buddhist lama and played poker and horseshoes for rupees with other climbers at the 17,000-foot base camp.
Whittaker’s team employed 10 Sherpas.
One of the scariest parts of the expedition for Whittaker was the infamous Khumbu icefall, a glacier that spills down a narrow valley at a rate of 4 feet per day.
Blocks of ice the size of trucks can break loose at any moment.
Climbers move as fast as possible through the shifting ice, crossing over deep crevasses with ropes and ladders.
“If this feature were on any other mountain in the world, on Rainier or on Baker or Mount Olympus, you wouldn’t imagine going through it,” Whittaker said.
“It’s that dangerous.”
Since it takes several weeks for the body to acclimate to the low oxygen on Everest, climbers make several “rotations” up and down the mountain to progressively higher camps.
Whittaker’s team crossed the Khumbu icefall about a dozen times during its expedition.
As for his future, Whittaker said he will continue to seek out new adventures.
“There are still countless mountains to climb and countless corners of the world to explore,” Whittaker said.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-417-3537 or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
