George and Nancy Whitmore stand at the top of Mt. Washburn in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo.

High-Minded Couple

George and Nancy Whitmore share peak experiences

“Some of our best-known efforts included a push to make Sequoia National Forest a national park so entrepreneurs like Walt Disney couldn’t turn it into a resort haven with tax-funded highways and monorails running in from all directions,” he said.

“Others included the Kings River campaign to keep a dam out of Roger’s Crossing and defeating an old 1930s proposal to get Interstate 70 to pass right through Minaret Summit near the middle fork of the San Joaquin River.

“This was during the golden age of conservation, so many of the things we were fighting for probably wouldn’t work today.”

Whitmore still “hikes and scrambles around,” but most of his climbing is not dangerous enough to be “on-rope.”

George Whitmore

George and Nancy Whitmore have been married almost 32 years. Nancy enjoys hiking and has gone climbing with George several times. “He had to pull me through the hard parts,” she recalled.

Nancy enjoys her work and appreciates her Union job. “I had a young friend who worked non-Union and became pregnant,” she said.

“She was a good worker, but management trumped up a bunch of charges so they could fire her. That can’t happen at a Union store.”

Nancy has had her own share of problems. “I had thyroid cancer and a transient-ischemic attack (TIA), which is pretty much a pre-stroke,” she said. “But it’s great to have medical benefits that cover everything.”

 George and Nancy Whitmore seem like a normal couple. George, 79, is a former pharmacist and Nancy stillworks as a pharmacist for Rite Aid in Fresno.

They manage rental property and enjoy their cats. But in the annals of California’s mountaineers, George’s name appears as one of the greats. He was among the first climbers to conquer the “Nose” route to the top of Yosemite’s

El Capitan, a 2,900-foot vertical rock wall previously thought un-climbable, in 1958.

“I was exposed to mountain climbing at around age 6, when I went to Yosemite and everybody had binoculars looking up at the mountain climbers on the valley rim,” George recalled. “I was so incredibly frustrated because I couldn’t see the climbers.”

Whitmore later joined the Sierra Club’s Rock Climbing section and shared a rooming house with two climbers.

“They took me on some of their practice climbs and that’s how I got involved in climbing,” he said. “But who knows what would have happened if I didn’t have that first experience with mountain climbers when I was 6?” Whitmore earned a

“It was when I exited the service in 1957 that I became involved in the planning process for El Capitan,” he said.

“The ascent was a 16-month process,” he recalled. “We began the climb in the summer of 1957, but ran into technical difficulties and had to abandon the attempt. We affixed lines on the face and left the ropes there for future attempts.

“As a result of that failed attempt and the crowds that gathered to watch us, the Park Service banned seasonal climbing on El Capitan.”

In the fall of 1958, Wayne Merry, Rich Calderwood and Whitmore finally surmounted the wall. While Whitmore remembers enjoying the climb, scaling relatively unknown peaks were the real highlights of his climbing career.

“I was done with Yosemite when it became all about competitive climbing in the 1960s,” he said. “I’m more of a solitary climber who enjoys competing with myself.”

Some of Whitmore’s favorite peaks are in the Coast Range of British Columbia, Canada. In the 1970s and 1980s, Whitmore was a lobbyist for land conservation and forest protection.