George Whitmore

George William Whitmore (1931 to 2021) was an American mountain climber and conservationist. He was a member of the first team to climb the vertical face of El Capitan in 1958, by the route known as The Nose. Trained as a pharmacist at the University of California, San Francisco, he served in the Air Force as an aeromedical evacuation officer and later worked as a pharmacist. He was a lifelong wilderness activist, promoting the creation of the Kaiser Wilderness in 1976 and lobbying for the California Wilderness Act of 1984. He died in Fresno, California, on 1 January 2021 from complications after COVID-19, aged 89.