A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  In the fall of 1962, Tompkins walked out of the forest near Emerald Bay State Park, on the shores of Lake Tahoe in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. He was ruggedly handsome, tightly muscled, totally broke, and in need of a ride to San Francisco. He started hitchhiking. A car pulled over. Tompkins climbed in and the driver, Susie Russell, thought the hitchhiker looked like a handsome bandit, with his rough clothes and coils of climbing ropes strapped like bandoliers across his chest. As he sat down, Susie asked, “Where are you from?” Not missing a beat, Doug swatted the question back with a cocky “Back east. The better coast.”

  Susie, who was an independent nineteen-year-old and earning hundreds of dollars as a Keno runner in a Reno casino, didn’t think twice as she dropped Doug in San Francisco, telling herself she was good to be rid of this “arrogant lumberjack.” A week later, at work, she received a message. Doug, that guy she had picked up hitchhiking, was in a jam. He was in jail for shoplifting a steak from a Safeway supermarket. Could she post bail? Susie lent him all the $65 cash from her cash pouch and never expected to hear from Doug again. But he repaid the loan and gifted her with flowers liberated from the dumpster at the funeral parlor next door to his San Francisco apartment. Doug soon invited Susie to dinner. It went well, and they made plans to escape to Mexico in a Volkswagen van. “He picked me up at my mother’s house,” said Susie. “I had a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, a bikini, and no shoes. And off I went.”

  Within a year they were married at the Tompkins home in Millbrook, New York. After the wedding, they packed a few pieces from Jack’s antique business in the back of their beat-up van and headed west, first to deliver the furniture, then to settle in Northern California. The van was missing windows, so they drove and rode while sitting inside sleeping bags. It was 1963 and they were carefree, nomadic, and early arrivals to the revolution. Rumblings of the hippie, psychedelic, and political uprising that commenced in California were about to spread throughout the United States.

  Settling at a lodge in Squaw Valley, California, Doug worked on the ski patrol and Susie waitressed. They lived in a rented basement, trying to scrounge up money from the sale of “Doug’s Rugs”—one of his many efforts to launch a brand, in this case finely woven Persian rugs. “Doug had a big drive and a lot of energy, and he was very physically oriented,” said Susie. “But I think that a lot of that came from the fact that his father was so unfair to him and cruel to him. He never complimented him. Never acknowledged him. It was really hard.” Sensitive to his lack of academic credentials, Tompkins carried a chip on his shoulder the size of the high school diploma he never obtained. “He told people he was a Yale student,” said Susie. “He was creating this person that he wanted to be and was setting the stage.”

  As his business selling ski gear and climbing supplies expanded, Tompkins moved his tiny shop from the garage in Berkeley to a less expensive basement location in San Francisco. In spring 1965, the owners of the Swiss Ski Shop, whose basement Doug had rented for his store, shut down for the summer, giving Doug a brief run of the street-level space, as well. Although he had only a ninety-day sublet, he launched a complete renovation of the entire store. Exploring north of San Francisco in rural Sonoma County, Doug discovered abandoned chicken coops framed with weathered redwood planking. Looking at the grain, admiring the hues, he was reminded of the antique furniture his father coveted and valued. Tompkins envisioned the redwood planks as wall paneling for his retail space. The chicken farmers viewed the half-collapsed structures as a fire hazard and eyesore, so they thanked the energetic young man from San Francisco who didn’t charge a penny to haul away a truckload of the mess. “I thought it was strange he was investing so much time in a store we’d only rented for three months, but he had this passion to make things great,” said Steve Komito, an early employee of The North Face. “His attitude was ‘Of course it’s going to work! Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.’”

  Tompkins had no money for marketing, so he helped plan a stunt. What if an employee of The North Face rappelled down the face of a San Francisco skyscraper and grabbed a cup of coffee from the bemused building owner six floors up? Dwelle tied a 600-foot rope to the penthouse atop San Francisco’s Pacific National Bank building and then, with Doug’s climbing friend Galen Rowell, Dwelle slid down a rope to the sixth floor, stopped, and drank the coffee. They had alerted photographers—the media went nuts. Their rebel advertising worked as the San Francisco Chronicle ran a feature story. To further promote his new business, Tompkins placed an ad in the Yellow Pages and ordered 5,000 boxes of matches, each one printed with the legend “The North Face, 308 Columbus Av.”

  “He ordered 5,000, thinking he was ordering 5,000 matchbooks, but 5,000 boxes of matchbooks showed up,” explained Dwelle. “He had all this investment and the Swiss [Ski Shop] guys tell him, ‘We’re going to move downtown; you can come with us if you want.’ Doug replied, ‘I can’t move; the season has just started. I’ve got advertising out there; people are coming in.’ And they said, ‘If you want to stay here you can take over the lease.’ That’s how The North Face became a viable store.”

  Edgar Boyles, a friend of Doug’s, who lived nearby and studied photography and filmmaking, visited his buddy’s store to marvel at the latest upgrades. It was all handmade, more sweat than equity. “It was hard to understand what he was doing,” said Boyles. “Everything in the store was done to the aesthetic level of an art piece.”

  As The North Face entered its second year, Doug capitalized on a deep cultural shift. More and more urban and suburban residents were taking to the mountains. Middle-class Americans had a rise in leisure time, while widespread auto ownership enabled families to take camping trips into little-known national parks. Hiking and camping became booming national pastimes. Visits to US National Parks soared from 53 million in 1958 to more than 130 million in 1968. Tompkins acquired distribution rights to novel ski technologies, including the Lange plastic ski boot and ultratight stretch ski pants. Macho climbers, ski-bunnies, wandering poets, and the odd tourist all mixed it up inside The North Face, practically guaranteeing a lively scene. The shop was often more like a living room cocktail party than a retail experience. Doug loved the show. He was fascinated by circus performers and saw his small store as a theater to be decorated, and as master of ceremonies he was never bored.

  Tompkins knew his products had appeal, but he was limited by the dimensions of his tiny establishment. Yvon ran a mail order catalog for Chouinard Equipment and described to Doug how he shipped box after box of his climbing hardware. With Dwelle working nonstop, Doug organized his own mail order catalog. Instead of a typical appeal to the wallet, this was an appeal to the heart. Printed on extra-large sheets of paper, The North Face catalog featured pencil drawings. There were no photos and no models, and the catalog began with a handwritten letter signed by Douglas Tompkins. The catalog was elegant and brash. It projected a rebel attitude with a counterintuitive message—“Pack less and enjoy more.”

  When The North Face catalog was ready, Tompkins printed 10,000 copies and mailed them out. Two days later, a truck from the US Postal Service pulled up and dropped off fifteen mailbags. The mailman was not happy. “You’ve got to sort ’em,” he ordered, and left. Tompkins ignored the advice. “We’re not going to do that,” he told Dwelle. “We’ll just put ’em in piles, order the ones on top, make it look like they’re all sorted.”

  Tompkins and Dwelle sorted the first few catalogs by zip code and put the 10,000 unsorted catalogs back in the mail. Two days later, a US Postal Service truck pulled up again and dropped off all fifteen bags with the 10,000 catalogs. The message was clear: if you don’t comply, the next time they will be destroyed. “That happened on a Friday, so on the weekend we went down to [San Francisco’s] Washington Square Park, and we spread out all 10,000 catalogs in the park, and hand-sorted the addresses,” explained Dwelle—“the two of us, walking around, looking at zip codes, until we got them in order. During a sunny day, we took over half of
the park. People would stop and ask, ‘What are you doing? Can I have one of those? Is it a promotional event?’ No. But it turned out that way. They finally went out in the mail, but they may have gotten more exposure through being spread out in the park on that sunny day.”

  Thanks to their standout catalog and Yvon’s guidance, The North Face boomed. Orders flooded in. Sales of Yvon’s climbing gear also soared. Dwelle regularly drove to Southern California, returning with a van sagging on its springs from the weight of hundreds of pounds of Chouinard products. As a subculture, climbers were suddenly cool and, like musicians, they attracted groupies. Rick Ridgeway, a friend of Doug’s, was in the store one day when a yellow Porsche squealed to the curb in front of The North Face and a woman’s voice echoed out: “Doooooooooooouuug!!!! Let’s Gooooo!!!!!” It was a rowdy and deep voice, and “Doug climbed in and she sped away,” said Ridgeway. After several blocks, Tompkins was terrified. He always prided himself on driving fast, but this was too much. He jumped out of the Porsche when the driver slowed and walked back to the store. To his friends he vowed never to get into a car again with Janis Joplin.

  Sporting a beard and curly brown hair, Tompkins pursued a broad understanding of free love as he rocked to Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore and hung out with Jann Wenner, who urged him to finance a rock ’n’ roll magazine he planned to call Rolling Stone. On weekends, Doug joined fireplace chats at the Berkeley home of mountain climbers Francis and Mary Farquhar with activist David Brower, who as president of the Sierra Club led campaigns to create Redwood National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore. Brower was a talented speaker with a resounding baritone and a magnetic personality who preached the need for mountaineers to share the spirit of the journey. “It is not variety that is the spice of life,” Brower riffed. “Variety is the meat and potatoes. Risk is the spice of life. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this.”

  Sitting in a living room and listening, Doug felt he was “at the feet of the Archdruid and the anointed circle.” Tompkins felt a deep affinity for the one-liners and sloganeering that the tenacious Brower wielded. “He was good at boiling down an issue. He could quickly see strategies to get policy changed or stop something—an unwise dam, bad forest practices. He persevered and kept the pressure on. He didn’t give up and he hated to throw in the towel.”

  Although they each had committed to forming a family, Yvon and Doug frequently escaped the responsibilities of running Chouinard Equipment and The North Face. They went hiking, climbing, and camping for weeks, even months at a time, disappearing into the wild. Following every extreme expedition, the two returned with complaints about shoddy gear. Why, they asked, was it so difficult to find high-quality equipment? Couldn’t anybody make a sleeping bag that dried quickly? How about a tent that didn’t catch the wind like a kite?

  Chouinard noticed that the standard ice axe design was flawed. When he swung an ice axe into a block of ice, half the time it bounced off. Couldn’t someone make a curved head that matched the arc of a mountaineer’s swing? They dreamed of equipment that wouldn’t fail them.

  In October 1966, Tompkins planned to launch The North Face’s new winter season. He needed a stunt to make a splash, so he asked Jerry Mander, a music promoter friend, to jazz up the evening. Why not have a party? Live music, ample marijuana, and cold beer could work. They heard about an up-and-coming band, a shaggy quartet that included a bearded guitarist named Jerry. “They call themselves ‘The Grateful Dead.’ You wanna try and get them?” Mander asked. Tompkins replied with a smile. “The Grateful Dead—that sounds good.”

  The Grateful Dead set up stage in front of an eight-foot-high Ansel Adams landscape photograph and played a set. Susie greeted everyone, and posed for a picture with Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the blues singer leading the band. Joan Baez showed up. Her sister Mimi Fariña sang. The crowd overflowed into the street. To keep an eye on the ruckus, Tompkins hired motorcycle gang the Hell’s Angels who sported wild beards, weaponized chains, and a reputation as outlaw enforcers. When the gig ended, Tompkins invited the Hell’s Angels and The Grateful Dead to Vanessi’s, a white-tablecloth restaurant. Doug and Susie couldn’t stop laughing at the cultural clash between the Italian waiters with bow ties and the greasy motorcycle gangsters with sleeveless leather vests.

  After the Grateful Dead concert, The North Face was firmly on the cultural map. Tompkins expanded the mail order business and opened stores in Berkeley and Palo Alto. The catalog garnered rave reviews, and The North Face store became a cultural attraction—like an art gallery stuffed with a crowd of beatniks, dirtbag climbers, and Doug and Susie’s circle of friends.

  By the early 1960s Kerouac’s prediction of a “Rucksack Revolution” was reality, and Doug had carved out a niche in the burgeoning outdoor clothing and gear market. Catalog sales grew month after month, and Doug was besieged with requests to franchise. Yet every time he finally abandoned the city and escaped to Point Reyes National Seashore or took his daughter walking in Muir Woods or went climbing in Yosemite National Park, he ended up besieged by friends and even strangers who needed answers to their questions about gear. They all knew Doug was atop the latest innovations and trends. “I was going nuts,” said Doug. “And I thought—What am I doing? Here I am in a sport that I love, but I end up having to talk equipment with everybody?”

  Tompkins decided to sell The North Face. He had a few debts, but, more importantly, he needed a fresh mission, an expedition, an escape. He craved ventures that broke all the rules and carved a fresh path. In 1967, Tompkins sold The North Face for a paltry $50,000. He’d launched a brilliant concept, fueled the brand with adrenaline, and was now ready to jump into something completely different. Tompkins split the cash into two ventures. He would fund the Plain Jane dress company that his wife, Susie, and her friend Jane were slowly building. With their own creative juices, a bit of cash, and some marketing tips from Doug, they could expand their fledgling clothing business. Perhaps even hire a pattern maker. The business was clearly working. Jane modeled in Paris and brought back the latest fashions. Susie and she together knocked off the designs, fitted the sizes to American women’s bodies, and sold their dresses at flea markets. Doug put the second chunk of money into his dream to film his own adventures. If he could get paid to climb, hike, and explore, what could be better?

  Bruce Brown had just directed Endless Summer, an ode-to-surf-film that cost $50,000 and went on to gross $30 million. Across the United States Endless Summer broke box office records for a travel documentary. In Lawrence, Kansas, amid cornfields, and as far as a surfer could be from Eden, college students and farm boys waited in line to imbibe Brown’s fantasy surfscape. Perhaps, Tompkins thought, the audience for adrenaline is limitless? Could he chronicle his passion for extreme climbing with the same irreverence and humor that Brown brought to surfing? When he put The North Face up for sale, the asking price was the budget of Endless Summer: $50,000. Now Tompkins could reinvent himself as a movie director; all he needed was one wild idea.

  In the spring of 1968, Doug fell in love with a photo, and his life compass flipped from Northern Hemisphere to Southern Hemisphere. He couldn’t take his eyes off the statuesque silhouette he first spotted in a black-and-white photograph. Doug stared at the image—there was no doubt these were perfect lines. A singular beauty. He revved his black Triumph and, unable to contain his glee, roared his motorcycle south along California’s picturesque Route 1. Leaving San Francisco behind, the wind whipping his hair, he slalomed like a skier. He banked through the curves—redwood forest to his left, a cliff to his right, and the Pacific Ocean crashing into the rocks below. Doug roared south to share the news with Yvon—he had a new amore.

  Doug found Yvon at his beachside hut in Southern California hammering pitons in his workshop. They surfed and partied on Ventura Beach. Doug talked passionately about his latest attraction. He showed Yvon the picture; they both stared. Doug was obsessed. He couldn’t get his mind off the image: Mount Fitz Roy,
an 11,289-foot mountain peak rising above the flowing Argentine prairie grasses and sculpted like an arrowhead. Surrounding peaks were so steep they looked like knitting needles balanced on end. The granite walls were nearly vertical. Buffeted by brutal winds and buried in deep snow, Fitz Roy was extremely challenging. Only two expeditions had reached the summit. Not a single American climber had reached the Fitz Roy peak. Alpine magazine summed up Fitz Roy as “good ice climbing, weather unstable, wind ferocious.”

  The photo that so inspired Doug and Yvon was the back cover of a mountaineering magazine. Staring at the photo, Doug and Yvon understood the challenge. Spears of granite rock—similar to the climbing conditions they knew so well in Yosemite—but here at the southern extreme of the Americas, they would be closer to Antarctica than the equator, literally at the ends of the earth. The beauty of Fitz Roy was as impressive as the technical challenge. Six needle-like spires formed a landscape any climber could love.

  Although barely one-third the height of Mount Everest, Fitz Roy is arguably more challenging. The final 2,000-foot climb up Fitz Roy is as steep as the Empire State Building. The bulging granite wall carried the heft of Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Sugarloaf Mountain, but Fitz Roy was girdled by glaciers, hammered by gale-force winds, and dressed in ice. The mountain had long been shrouded in mystery and myth. Until 1908 cartographers assumed the whirling clouds around the peak were puffs of smoke and dutifully mapped “Volcano Fitz Roy.”

  Situated at the southernmost tail of the Andes Mountains in South America, Fitz Roy belonged to Patagonia, a land as mythical as it was tempting. Doug knew that Yvon was among the few climbers skilled enough to scale Fitz Roy, but could he lead a full expedition to summit? Could they film it? They both dropped all their plans and that morning began plotting an epic journey. How to climb the unclimbable? What time of year was best? Who else did they need to confront this challenge?