A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  Chouinard thought Patagonia itself would be a great business name because nobody knew what Patagonia was in those days. “It was like Timbuktu,” he said. “How many people know where Timbuktu is? In Mexico, a parent would ask their kid, ‘Hey, where have you been?’ And the kid, just to blow off his parents, would say, ‘I’ve been in Patagonia.’”

  No matter how many stories they told or plans they forged, the storms outside screamed on day after day. “There wasn’t a single day we could climb,” said Lito. “It was howling. We couldn’t go up. We thought, well at least we could probably go down.”

  Eleven tediously long days stretched past. “We passed time patching up the cave and dreaming—of home, of food, of anything,” said Jones. “Sometimes it was so bad we couldn’t go outside all day. We had heard all our stories over and over; new ideas were nonexistent; life was held in suspension.”

  Doug studied the shrinking food stash––tins of canned oatmeal, a pot of watery bean soup, and a stack of bacon bars. They all agreed to reduce their meals, to a few spoonfuls of food. “We were eating so little food; it’s incredible how little our ration size was. I think I was getting one thousand calories a day. A silly amount,” said Jones. “We didn’t have enough food to keep ourselves warm.”

  Whenever the storm halted briefly, a couple of climbers would tunnel out of their snowed-in cave to see if the weather was breaking. But no luck. Fifty-mile-an-hour gusts made it impossible to consider going up, impossible to resume their climb. But they couldn’t stay in the ice cave indefinitely. After weeks of storm, their supplies, food, and gas for the stove were all running low. “Our objective was always to go down and get more. What was preventing us from going down was our fear of the weather,” explained Jones. “We knew we had to go down, because we didn’t have enough food, but we didn’t want to be killed.”

  Finally, the men made a break for it. “Ninety percent of the time, we retreat from storms we could have kept on climbing through. Most times storms are uncomfortable, they won’t kill you,” Doug wrote. “But on Fitz Roy these storms are a different story. We had to get out.”

  Rappelling down the steep, snow-plastered face of the Silla, then trudging across the Piedras Blancas glacier in a whiteout, they retreated, first to the lower ice cave and then all the way back to their base camp in the forest. It was a long and careful descent. “We hate rappelling,” said Chouinard. “A lot of people love rappelling. They think that’s the big part of climbing—big jumps and stuff like that. We hate that because you’re totally dependent on your anchor and on the rope.”

  Back at the French base camp, they dug into their supplies. Yvon baked bread, they dried their clothes, and, finally moving once more, the men began regaining their strength and their spirits. Yet red clouds in the morning warned them that fresh storm clouds were headed their way. Base camp life seemed plush compared with the cramped existence in their ice cave, but their thoughts were focused on what was waiting for them up on the mountain. Fitz Roy wasn’t hidden by swirling clouds. Most of the time, the final cliffs and the summit high above were visible, but screaming streamers of spindrift blowing off the peak indicated that the wind was too strong to stand up in, much less climb. They waited, impatient to climb, too stubborn to give up their quest. After twenty-five straight days of storm, the weather broke. The five Fun Hogs quickly retraced their steps to the first ice cave, spent the night, and headed toward the upper mountain ice cave.

  On top of the Silla they approached the second ice cave, but where was it? A snow tornado whipped a cloud around and around the granite peaks. “I couldn’t see my hands,” said Lito. “I could see the wind up there knocking spindrift, ice crystals, off the peaks and blowing it way out into the air. It was howling. We knew we couldn’t climb.”

  The men searched methodically along the ridge. Snow fell but never seemed to hit the ground. The wind had changed the mountain landscape. Familiar formations were buried, and all recognizable features erased. After an hour of reconnoitering, the team still couldn’t find their shelter. “We neglected to mark the entrance,” said Tompkins. “The ice cave was buried under a thick layer of windblown snow.”

  Then, with a whoop of excitement, Chris Jones signaled he had found the snow cave. Jones, alternating with Tompkins, hacked away the ice using the steel blades of the small shovels they had purchased in Bariloche. Slowly, they chopped their way down to their underground cave. Melting snow had turned the entrance into an icy tube as slippery as a bobsled run and as hard as a hockey rink. Tompkins and Jones crawled Marine style, elbow by elbow. Tompkins pushed away fresh snow, squeezed his hand inside the cave and made a hole big enough for his head. He slid inside. One by one the frozen Fun Hogs then entered their snow home. Their finished cave was crooked and leaky—so they dubbed it “Cado Cave” in homage to Peter “Cado” Avenali, a close friend of Doug’s who was so messy and laid back that anything so upended could be classified as “that’s Cado style.”

  Their food supplies were rock hard, the floor was wet, and the temperature was stuck at a soggy 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Given the long days of the southern summer, they reckoned they would get back before nightfall—and if not, they’d sit out the night in the cave. “We were climbing until the weather stopped us,” said Chouinard. “We had no forecasts, no GPS, no way of knowing what was going on, so we were at the mercy of the weather.”

  The wind ate away the roof of their shelter. A crack in the floor sucked snow into the crevasse that snaked into the innards of the mountain. Every time they filled the gap, it returned. It was a painstaking job to coax their frozen stove back to life, and the men spoke little. Exhausted from the trek, scoured by the windstorm, they collapsed asleep. Despite the terrible weather, the peak felt imminent. If the clouds blew through and the skies cleared, they could soon commence their summit attack.

  Two days later, on the evening of December 18, 1968, Tompkins and Chouinard looked out of their ice cave and stared in excitement. The sky was clear, the stars bright. The team quickly agreed to launch their summit attempt. They packed extra ropes for the descent, and headlamps. If forced to spend the night on the mountain, they would have only the clothes on their backs. They set an alarm clock for 3:00 a.m. with plans to begin climbing at 4:00 a.m. While the others prepared their ropes and gear, Tompkins turned the alarm back to 1:00 a.m., two hours earlier. He figured they could climb in the dark for the first hours.

  Leaving the cave they found the weather bitterly cold. In the predawn dark, the team reached the steep granite wall of the southwest buttress. The rock climb they had been waiting for was on. It would demand precise scouting on a hitherto unvisited rock face, as well as innovative climbing strategies. Having five climbers provided extra security if anything went wrong, but with only three climbing ropes, how could they move together? How could they belay each other, and follow each pitch? A pattern was quickly established: Chouinard and Tompkins took turns leading. After one rope length, the leader would fix a rope for the others to follow. Jones backed up the leaders, cleaning the hardware that the leader had placed to protect the pitch. Lito was on his own, filming with a camera that was starting to freeze, and after such a long wait for a summit day he didn’t dare ask any of the others to wait, or pause while he changed the 100-foot film rolls for his Bolex.

  The climbers all used the rope that the leader had fixed to follow each pitch with a sliding-gripping clip called a jumar. And here Dick Dorworth, the least experienced climber on the team, had an important role to play. As the last man up each pitch, he would coil up the rope he had just ascended and pass it on to the leaders to use again. While the five men moved up the cliff, each absorbed by the moment, Dorworth would lose sight of the others, and couldn’t hear them. He felt isolated, extremely nervous, and felt like an unwanted caboose. He had to keep cool and focused. “If I fall, I die,” Dorworth told himself, then tried to avoid thinking about the possible danger. “I just kept telling myself Don’t go there. Don’t go there. Don’t
go there.”

  As clouds shot over the ridge, past the summit, it was frigid until they climbed out of the shadows. Not till noon did they reach sunlight. Chouinard and Tompkins kept probing for the best route—a line of opportunity in the cold granite that was rough with useful cracks. Tompkins remarked how similar it was to the granite that the Fun Hogs loved to climb in Yosemite Valley—but much colder. Fingerless wool gloves allowed them to keep their hands warm but use bare fingertips to grip the rock. Tompkins called the simple, handwoven gloves his “finest piece of gear.”

  As they rose higher, the wind pushed misty streamers of cloud up the side of the walls. The temperature stayed frigid, but their optimism grew. After one last tough pitch they cleared a notch that they figured would bring them to the summit finale. “We thought we had it in the bag,” said Jones. “And then suddenly there were these ice-coated pinnacles blocking our way to the summit. That meant at least a couple of hours more climbing. And there was rime [a dangerous thin layer of ice] covering the rock.”

  “Reaching the crest, we saw the problem: a scimitar-like summit ridge,” said Lito. “We had to cross a series of ice-plastered towers, if we could. There was no clue to the size of the gap that separated us from the summit, and only one way to find out.” The men kept climbing up, then around a corner, then repeat. “Doug was climbing like a man possessed,” said Dorworth. “Taking iced grooves and rotten snow in his stride.”

  Several hours and four towers later, they had crossed the final serrated ridge. Tompkins rappelled down a pitch, climbed up a twenty-foot crack, and unroped. “My enthusiasm to see if there would be any more technical difficulties caused me to set off ahead while the others finished their pitches,” said Tompkins. “I climbed until I could see we had it, then I walked out to the lip above the top of the Super Couloir and saw my companions appear and disappear in the clouds below.”

  One by one the climbers appeared—Yvon, Lito, Dick, and Chris. In appreciation of his camerawork (as well as the need for the summiting shot), Lito was sent first. Each man took slow, secure steps before standing on the small summit block. Sharp peaks that from the ground looked unscalable now lay beneath them. Chouinard summed up the group’s feeling: “Well, now. We have earned our freedom for a while.”

  Tompkins grinned and savored the peak. Clouds roared beneath them, hiding their descent route and offering brief glimpses of Lago Viedma below. They could see the vast Patagonian ice fields and volcanoes. “We were on top of the world at that moment—masters, in our own minds, of all we surveyed,” said Tompkins. “Suddenly all the agonies of the ice caves, the cold hands and feet, the discomfort and poor or little food, the uncertainty in the final weeks as to whether we could get enough good weather to do the climb—it all vanished. That surge of satisfaction all climbers feel when they have reached their goal was gushing from all five of us.” A rising wind poured clouds in from all sides. The Fun Hogs were nervous about being caught out in what Tompkins called a “Patagonian bomber.” They turned their attention to the descent.

  As the wind picked up, the men carefully climbed down, sliding down their doubled ropes, rappelling, then pulling the rope down after them. It was tricky with winds so strong that ropes sometimes flew up past them, risking a snagged line that could halt their descent. “You don’t let your guard down at all, that’s for sure,” said Chouinard. “In fact, you purposely know that you have to really stay alert. A lot of the times these guided guys on Everest, if the guide gets into trouble up high, the clients don’t know how they got there. When we’re climbing, we’re looking to see, Okay, if we get a storm here, we could bail out on this little gully here. You’re always thinking; we’re pretty aware that coming down can be more dangerous than going up.”

  The long summer daylight lingered but then their luck ran out as the wind whipped a rope, hanging it on a ledge. “Hands frozen, headlamps peering into the falling snow, our rope stuck; it was a bad moment,” said Tompkins. They stopped rappelling around 2:00 a.m., and prepared to bivouac on a tiny ledge. Bivouacking is a lot less than camping; to a climber it means stopping and waiting for morning. They tied themselves to the wall by a webbing of fixed ropes. Dorworth slept with his boots on as he could no longer feel his toes. Tompkins felt their gear slamming into the stone as the wind slapped them about. They rested, and shivered. “It was freezing cold and I didn’t sleep or anything,” said Chouinard. “I just kind of sat.”

  At dawn they made a break for their upper ice cave. Their rappel ropes wouldn’t stay down, the noise of wind “cracked like a whip at a circus lion,” as slowly they descended. Said Tompkins, “We arrived back at our cramped ice cave at 11:00 a.m., worn out and cold, and after a victory flan dropped off to sleep until late afternoon.” The lines of the script had been spoken correctly—they had climbed Fitz Roy by a new route. They had their film.

  But at home, no one knew if they were dead or alive. The men were months overdue. Susie called Yvon’s wife, Malinda Chouinard, and asked if they should launch a rescue. They knew few people who were capable of finding climbers in the wilds of South America and decided that after the holidays they would contact the American Alpine Club and put out an SOS for their lost partners.

  Little did Tompkins and Chouinard realize that this adventure forged their lifelong friendship and prepared them each to overcome the challenges of the business world. They had one foot on the mountain and one in the idea of creating businesses that were respectful of nature. Yet, even in their wildest dreams, they could never have imagined that thanks to their serendipitous journey, Chouinard would become a force for corporate generosity as the leader of Patagonia clothing company and Doug among the greatest conservationists of his generation. Years later, after retelling the low points he lived while stuck in the snow cave, Yvon saw a deep value in their perseverance and suffering. “It honed me to handle adversity,” he said. “So it was also the high point.”

  Chapter 4

  Plain Jane Goes Mainstream

  Doug is a real force, and if he sees something that’s interesting to him or that’s an opportunity of some sort, he’ll grab it and make it happen.

  —SUSIE TOMPKINS

  On New Year’s Day 1969, Doug Tompkins celebrated New Year’s several times as he flew home. Along the staggered time zones he toasted in Santiago, Chile; and in Lima, Peru; then in Los Angeles; and finally in San Francisco he celebrated arriving home. Susie met Doug at the airport and at home, she reintroduced him to Summer, their six-month infant daughter. Doug didn’t recognize the baby. Summer carried few firm memories of her globetrotting dad who left the day after she was born.

  Back in San Francisco, Doug wrestled with what was next, while Lito spent months sorting and cataloging the film from the Fun Hog trip. The footage was used in two separate documentary films, neither of which became the hoped-for sequel to Endless Summer. In the rarefied world of climbing cinema, Lito’s short film Fitz Roy: First Ascent of the Southwest Buttress won the Grand Prize at the 1969 Trento International Film Festival in Italy. It also garnered a small cult following.

  Doug, meanwhile, considered opening a new business in San Francisco, perhaps a restaurant. Brainstorming for weeks about food in the ice cave had whetted his appetite and churned up a wealth of foodie ideas. The outdoor equipment market was booming, and so too were the sales of Yvon’s climbing gear. But selling outdoor gear was not an option. Doug promised never again to contaminate his love of the wild with livelihood. Yvon climbed and continued to produce the finest tools for fellow dirtbags, but that was not Doug’s style. Addicted to outdoor exploits and unconvinced that filming adventure films would ever be profitable for him, he sought a way to keep himself engaged in the city eight months a year. Under no circumstances was he living in urban areas more than that. From the first days of dating and through marriage with Susie, he’d always made it very clear that four months a year—sometimes six—he would disappear over the horizon: no permissions asked, no excuses needed. For those four months a
year he was not husband, nor father nor CEO. He was just Doug, out in the bush with buddies, experiencing a time when he could test himself and embark on hair-raising trips that most people only read about in magazines.

  Yvon agreed with his close friend. “If you can’t have three or four months a year for what you really love, you are in the wrong job,” Yvon declared. Convinced that athletes were the epitome of impassioned individuals and solid teammates, Yvon deliberately recruited surfers to work at Patagonia Inc. “It’s easier to teach a surfer to be a businessman than a businessman to be a surfer,” he laughed. “When you are a surfer and the surf’s up, you grab a board. You don’t schedule surfing for 4:00 p.m. next Tuesday.”

  Doug was absent from his family’s life for months at a time. Raising a family never reached the intensity of his buddy trips or work passion, although he shared his spark of adventure with the girls. “There were always new ideas. Let’s go do this, let’s go do that. And there would be a spontaneous trip to Point Reyes National Seashore with his small daughters,” said Edgar Boyles, a longtime friend. “We’d climb up some hill and camp for the night with the kids. Doug’s aesthetic was always go light, don’t be burdened by stuff. Sometimes it would be what they call disaster camping. You might have what you need, but you might not.”

  In a telling black-and-white family portrait from the early years of Plain Jane, Doug holds the hand of one of his daughters, but barely. She clutches the single extended finger offered by Dad, who is caught wearing an expression between aloof and unhappy.