Eric Shipton

In 1931, no one had climbed higher than Eric Shipton, a British coffee planter who cut his climbing teeth in Africa and made the first ascent of 7,756-meter (25,446-foot) Kamet in the Indian Himalaya with Frank Smythe and bagged eight other peaks besides. Shipton introduced Tenzing Norgay to the climbing game, gave a young Ed Hillary his start in Himalayan mountaineering, and is responsible for propagating the myth of the yeti, or “abominable snowman.” But Eric Shipton’s most enduring contribution to alpinism is style.

Together with his frequent climbing partner Bill Tilman, he espoused a lightweight approach to mountaineering at a time when nationalistic sieges were the vogue. Though that aesthetic has come to represent the highest form of alpinism, in Shipton’s day it made him an outlier and likely cost him the opportunity to lead the 1953 British Everest Expedition. The honor fell instead to Colonel John Hunt, a British Army officer who orchestrated a military-style assault on the world’s highest mountain. Shipton, who