Eric Shipton

ERIC SHIPTON CBE d1977. English Himalayan mountaineer. In 1928 he went to Kenya as a coffee grower and first climbed Nelion, a peak of Mount Kenya in 1929. It was also in Kenya's community of Europeans that he met his future climbing partners Bill Tilman and Percy Wyn-Harris. Together with Wyn-Harris he climbed the twin peaks of Mount Kenya. With Frank Smythe, he was amongst the first climbers to stand on the summit of Kamet (7756 metres) which in 1931 was the highest peak climbed at that time. He was involved with most of the Mount Everest expeditions during the 1930s and later, including the pioneering 1951 expedition which chalked out the now famous route over the Khumbu Glacier. He and Tilman also discovered the access route to the Nanda Devi sanctuary through the Rishi Ganga gorge in 1934. Their shoe-string budget expedition operated in the Kumaon-Garhwal mountains continuously from pre-monsoon to post-monsoon and set a record for single-expedition achievement that has never been equalled. For the last decade of his life, Eric Shipton continued to travel extensively, supporting himself by lecturing and acting as a celebrity guide ; also completing the second volume of his autobiography. He died of cancer in England aged 69 on March 28th 1977.