Ned Gillette

Edward French "Ned" Gillette (May 5, 1945 – August 5, 1998) was an American Olympic skier, journalist and explorer. In 1998 he was killed by bandits while mountaineering with his wife Susan Patterson in the Haramosh Valley of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Early life Edward French Gillette was born on May 5, 1945 in Barre, Vermont, USA, to Janet and Bob Gillette. His father was chairman of the National Life Insurance Company of Vermont. His father taught him to ski from the age of three, and took Ned and his sister Debbie to Quissett Harbor in Cape Cod, where Ned learned to sail. He attended Holderness School, New Hampshire from 1959 to 1963, where he first took up cross-country skiing. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1967, where he was captain of the college ski team and was the 1967 NCAA cross-country ski champion. While at Dartmouth, he was a member of Theta Delta Chi and the Casque and Gauntlet senior society.

After the Olympics, Ned worked for the International Paper Company and was in a management training program for a year and a half. In 1972 he began an MBA program at the University of Colorado, but dropped out after the first day.

Career Gillette honed his skiing and rock-climbing skills while working in Yosemite, and in 1972 Ned and a group of friends from Yosemite set off on a 30 day ski traverse of the Brooks Mountain range in Alaska, covering approximately 1000 km. In 1975 he made a 250 km ski traverse of the Mount Elias range along the Alaska-Canada border. He later made an 800 km ski traverse of Robeson Channel and Ellesmere Island in Canada, and a 1979 midwinter ski traverse of the Southern Alps of New Zealand.

In 1978, Gillette led an expedition alongside Galen Rowell that completed the first one-day ascent of Mount McKinley in Alaska.

Ned Gillette was posthumously elected to the National Ski Hall of Fame in 2000. Ned Gillette was cremated in Pakistan and his ashes were returned to Sun Valley, Idaho by his wife on August 17.