John Shipton embarks on a poignant trip to Patagonia.

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Shipton, the next generation

IN A LIFETIME spent exploring the world's most remote ranges, the legendary British mountaineer Eric Shipton wrote six classic exploration books, discovered the first route up Everest, and co-invented the now de rigueur fast-and-light approach to alpinism.

About the only person not impressed was Shipton's youngest son.

"To everybody else, he was this great hero," says John Shipton, a 50-year-old horticulturist from Y Felin, Wales. "To me, he was just this silly old bugger. He wasn't around much and that was all right with me."

Shipton the younger spent much of his youth rebelling against his father's "reactionary values." Thrown out of two schools, John eventually graduated and bummed around the world with the stated ambition of "becoming a beggar." Only now, something is calling him to the mountains. In March, he expects to be circling and, weather permitting, climbing Chile's 5,741-foot Mount Burney —a peak not touched since his father summited in 1973.

Burney's height may be modest, but Shipton's trip will involve two weeks of arduous tramping through thick temperate rainforest, peat bogs, and icefields. "This trip is totally what my father was all about," says Shipton.

So how did John finally come to follow, quite literally, in his dad's footsteps? For one thing, he read Everest and Beyond, Peter Steele's biography of the elder Shipton. "I realized there was another side to the family story than the one my mother always told me," says John. The trip also springs out of his own increasingly ambitious botanical outings—plant-hunting trips that have taken him to the highlands of Morocco, Turkey, and Chile.

As of late December, the affable but scattered Shipton was still mulling over a number of crucial details of his trip. "It's rather like the way Eric would have done it," says Steele. "I think he's starting to realize his father wasn't so bad after all." —Rob Buchanan

From Luna to Lumber

Shaun Walker/Otter Media

Julia "Butterfly" Hill inspects her wounded friend.