Eric Shipton
| Eric Earle Shipton | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1 August 1907 Ceylon |
| Died | 28 March 1977 (aged 69) England |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Exploration and high altitude mountaineering |
Eric Earle Shipton CBE (1 August 1907 – 28 March 1977) was a distinguished British Himalayan mountaineer.
Shipton was born in Ceylon (now called "Sri Lanka") in 1907 where his father, a tea planter, died before he was three years old. When he was eight his mother brought him to London so that he could be educated. When he failed the entrance exam to Harrow School his mother sent him to Pyt House School in Wiltshire. His first real encounter with mountains was at 15, when he visited the Pyrenees with his family. The next summer he spent travelling in Norway with a school friend and within a year he had begun climbing seriously.
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, Shipton was amongst the first climbers to stand on the summit of Kamet, 7756 metres, in 1931, the highest peak climbed at that time. Shipton was involved with most of the Mount Everest expeditions during the 1930s and later, including Hugh Ruttledge's 1933 expedition and the follow-up in 1936, the 1935 Mount Everest expedition which was Shipton's first as leader and the first for Tenzing Norgay, and the pioneering 1951 expedition which chalked out the now famous route over the Khumbu Glacier. Shipton 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.
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