A man above the rest

PHS graduate Lute Jerstad survived a night above 28,000 feet

GEORGE LE MASURIER

of the Gateway

Lute Jerstad was a man on the move. He didn’t do well sitting still. It’s hard to say whether he was blessed or cursed with a powerful internal momentum that pushed him into a remarkably adventurous trek through life. That journey took him from a shoebox warmed by a heat lamp on a Minnesota farm, where he spent his first weeks in this world, to the top of Mount Everest, where he made mountaineering history by surviving a freezing night in the open at 28,000 feet.

Along the way, he made many friends with his zest for life as an exceptional athlete and basketball star at Peninsula High School and Pacific Lutheran University, as a champion of environmental causes in India and Nepal, as a teacher and a caring guide who introduced deaf children, blind adults and the mentally and physically disabled to the wonders of nature.

He stood on the top of Mount Everest, the second American to reach the summit, and Mount McKinley. He climbed Mount Rainier more than 40 times.

This was a man who received a medal from President John F. Kennedy for his Everest heroics, who had a parade held in his honor in Gig Harbor and was twice written about in Life Magazine.

But as interesting as the things he did were, it was Jerstad’s persona that made its greatest mark on those who knew him.

“My dad was a dreamer,” said his daughter, Kari Olson, of Portland, Ore. “But he had the amazing ability to live his dreams.”

By all accounts, Jerstad was opinionated, outspoken and as politically incorrect as they came. He loved cigarettes, scotch and the poems of Robert Service almost as much as he loved the Nepalese people and their culture.

“He was more at home in Nepal and India than anywhere else in the world,” Olson said.

And as hard as he tried to fit into a mainstream American way of life, he just couldn’t do it.

“He tried to go the route of being the upstanding citizen, but he couldn’t quite fit into the box,” Olson said.

Jerstad died on Oct. 31, 1998, as he was taking his grandson, Marshall, to the Everest Base Camp in Nepal. He suffered a heart attack just 500 feet from the 18,192-foot summit of Mount Kalapatar, an easy climb known for its spectacular view of Everest.

He was cremated on the banks of the Bagmati River, and his ashes were scattered at the Thangboche monastery, where the ashes of two of his climbing partners, including Barry Bishop, reside.

“If I can say anything good of his passing, it is that, in keeping with his lifestyle, he was perhaps living out his greatest dream,” Olson said. “His biggest wish was to take his grandson to see the places and people he loved the best, and to have him understand some of what his life was all about.”

She and others have described her father as a “life artist.”

JJJ

Luther J. Jerstad was born prematurely in 1936 on a Minnesota farm. Weighing only 3 pounds, his parents incubated him in a shoebox and a heat lamp — the type used for raising chicks. They fed him with an eyedropper.

The family moved west when Jerstad turned 12 and settled in the Rosedale area of Gig Harbor.

Phil Whitmarsh rode the school bus with Jerstad and said all the kids called him “Buddy” through their elementary and middle school years.

At Peninsula High School, Jerstad lettered in basketball, football and baseball.

Another high school friend, Curt Knudson, remembered Jerstad as a clutch player.

Knudson recalled a tournament game when PHS trailed by one point. Coach Roy Anderson called a timeout and put in a play for Jerstad to get the last shot.

“And he drilled it from 20 feet,” Knudson said. “Everyone there that day still remembers that shot. What a player he was.”

Another school friend, Gateway columnist Colleen Slater, remembered Lute as someone who didn’t enjoy the spotlight. It was OK if he was hamming it up in a school play, she said, but he didn’t like getting up at a pep assembly as the team captain.

Slater suspects Jerstad studied speech and drama, eventually earning a Ph.D. in the subject, to overcome that childhood shyness.

Jerstad earned a bachelor’s degree from PLU, a master’s degree from Washington State University and his doctorate from the University of Oregon, where he later taught speech, drama and Asian culture.

Jerstad’s restlessness led him to a summer job guiding hikers on Mount Rainier and, at age 26, it gave him an opportunity to join the first and greatest American assault on Mount Everest.

The expedition took three years to plan and cost $400,000. But in April 1963, some 21 climbers and scientists and 37 Sherpas set out to accomplish what Sir Edmund Hillary had done 10 years before, and only two other teams, both from Switzerland.

After a six-week struggle against raging winds and freezing temperatures on the mountain — and the death of one climber — the team put only six men on top, five Americans and one Sherpa.

Jerstad was one of those men.

Jim Whittaker was the first American to reach the top on May 1, 1963, and Jerstad was scheduled to follow him from Camp VI at 26,000 feet. But after Whittaker descended, Jerstad had to abandon his assault due to a lack of bottled oxygen.

Three weeks later, Jerstad climbed all the way back up with new partner Barry Bishop. They planned to meet another team of Willi Unsoeld and Thomas Hornbein, who were hiking the West Ridge route from Tibet, at the summit in the early afternoon. The four would then descend together to Jerstad’s and Bishop’s camp at 27,450 feet.

After rising at 5 a.m., Jerstad and Bishop set out, slogging through the snow and rock, almost doubled over against the wind. By afternoon, they had reached the American flag Whittaker had placed on top of the world.

According to a Life Magazine cover story, “Barry had been sick and sleepless through the night; his pace was slower than Lute’s; and after alternating in the lead for a while they agreed that Lute should stay first on the rope.”

At the top, they rested, hunched against the strong wind, and Jerstad took pictures with the film camera he carried — the first motion pictures ever taken on Everest’s summit.

Jerstad had carried his grandmother’s Bible to the top, but he decided not to leave it there because “it was too harsh,” he said.

They waited for the other team and shouted for them, but at 4:15 p.m., with the sun going down, they began their descent.

They followed a precarious ridge that fell 12,000 feet on either side in the black of night. It took two hours to descend 300 feet. The other team of climbers eventually caught up to Jerstad and Bishop, and they continued down together.

At 12:30 a.m., at more than 28,000 feet and out of oxygen, the four found “an outcropping of rock on the snow of the ridge,” the Life magazine story read. “They lay down on it and waited for morning.”

Jerstad and his fellow climbers struggled to stay awake. They needed to in order to keep their warm blood flowing.

That night, they huddled, hugged and shivered. One of them lost all his toes to frostbite. Another lost nine toes. Jerstad was left with numbness in his legs that lasted for 20 years.

“All we could do was lie there and shiver,” Hornbein said in a tribute to Jerstad published in The Oregonian newspaper. “We were in it together, but each had his own struggle and couldn’t ask for help from another.”

It became the highest altitude bivouac in mountaineering history.

As the sun rose, they got up stiffly and headed down with extreme caution, for they were walking on numb feet. They couldn’t feel where they were stepping.

Any altitude about 26,000 feet is known as the “death zone” because the lack of oxygen sends the body into rapid decline. Jerstad spent the night higher than where eight climbers died from exposure in 1996.

Expedition organizer Norman Dyhrenfurth told a newspaper reporter, “it was the greatest accomplishment in Himalayan mountaineering.

“Their accomplishment was something the American public never understood,” he said. “America made Whittaker the hero for being first, even though the others achieved a far greater feat.”

After Everest, Jerstad tried to live a normal life. He earned his degrees and taught high school at Franklin Pierce in Tacoma, and then speech and drama at the University of Oregon. Later, he headed up the drama department at Lewis and Clark College.

But his ex-wife, Olson’s mother, Paula, who was his Peninsula High School sweetheart, said he was never the same when he returned from Everest.

He never bragged about it. He would only say, “You get very close to God,” Olson said.

Shrugging the routine he couldn’t stand, he soon quit to start Lute Jerstad Adventures, offering river rafting, mountaineering and outdoor experiences in the United States and Asia.

He was the first to raft down the Ganges River in 1976. His daughter, Kari, who, by that time, was working as part of Jerstad’s support crew. In 1978, he took another crew down the Ganges, including the actor Robert Duvall, and it was filmed for Wide World of Sports.

Jerstad spent half of his time in India and Nepal, working to conserve wildlife parks and forests so endangered species might survive.

“He wasn’t your traditional dad,” Olson said. “I think he spent a quarter of his time dreaming and the rest of it making that dream come true.”

She called him the most laid-back person she knew. He always got things done, but without any pressure.

“He was always out to appreciate where he was and who he was with,” she said.

An honored alumnus

Lute Jerstad received several honors during his lifetime, including:

National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal for exploration from President Kennedy.

The University of Oregon’s Distinguished Alumni award in 1998.

Inducted into the Tacoma Hall of Fame.

Donated his Mount Everest climbing gear to Pacific Lutheran University in 1967. It is still on display in the campus library.

Alumni of Distinction

This is the second in a series of four profiles for the inaugural Alumni of Distinction program.

The four Alumni of Distinction will be honored as part of the sixth annual Students of Distinction banquet, which will be held at 6:30 p.m. May 19 at Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church, 7700 Skansie Ave. NW in Gig Harbor.

Tickets, which won’t be available at the door, can be purchased now at The Peninsula Gateway, 3555 Erickson St. in Gig Harbor.

Here’s a look at the scheduled alumni profiles:

April 23: Theresa Malich

Today: Lute Jerstad

May 7: Steve Olson

May 14: Doris Heritage

Reach Publisher George Le Masurier at 253-853-9248 or by e-mail at publisher@gateline.com.