A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  Yvon was in. Earlier that year he had read a chronicle by the French climber Lionel Terray, describing the first ascent of Fitz Roy. Terray described climbing as a noble pursuit existing outside the realm of reason and sensibility. Climbers, he said, were Conquistadors of the Useless. Fitz Roy, suggested Terray, was singularly difficult. The gusty winds high on the mountain made tents impractical, and days on end he lived inside hand-carved snow caves. One climber, Yvon read, lost his hearing from the constant roar of wind during the Fitz Roy ascent. Not until three months after the expedition could he once again properly hear. Another French climber died. Jacques Poincenot fell into raging waters near base camp and drowned under a rock. His teammates christened a spectacular peak in his honor and mourned that during the easiest part of the expedition—simply crossing a river—Patagonia had stolen away their mate. Terray claimed that of all the mountains he climbed, Fitz Roy was one of just two that he never again wanted to face.

  Surfing and brainstorming in the heat at Ventura Beach, Yvon and Doug sketched out a six-month-long expedition. “We approach our mountain by land, driving from California, surfing on the west coast of Central and South America, ski for a month in Chile, and then on to Patagonia,” Doug gushed to Yvon. “We are going to ‘Hog Fun’ as much as we can for six months.” Tompkins baptized their adventure “The 1968 California Fun Hog Expedition to Patagonia.”

  June through October snowstorms battered Fitz Roy, so Doug and Yvon planned to arrive in November—before summer winds picked up. But the window between late spring blizzards and early summer gales was fleeting and dangerously unpredictable. They planned their departure for July and, given the inverted seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, they would drive from summer straight into spring. “Plans were piled on plans, fantasy on fantasy; by nightfall we had concocted the trip of trips,” said Tompkins. “We were like boys who sneak into an ice-cream shop at night to make themselves a gigantic sundae or banana split; it’s all free and the soda jockeys are always so stingy with the syrups.”

  Chapter 2

  Conquistadors of the Useless

  It’s hard to say sometimes why I’d get in a van and drive 16,000 miles to climb some mountain. I never really thought about the motives. I never really sat down and analyzed why I was going to do that. It would probably scare me.

  —DOUG TOMPKINS

  Just weeks after his beachside brainstorm with Yvon, in July 1968, packing what little remained of the $50,000 cash from selling The North Face, Doug Tompkins stuffed a ’65 Ford Econoline van with two Bolex 16-mm cameras, twelve rolls of film donated by mountaineer David Brower, a pile of spare tires, climbing ropes, downhill skis, and wet suits. Leaving San Francisco was easy for Doug—and painfully uncomfortable for his wife, Susie. She was nine months pregnant with their daughter Summer Tompkins and was already caring for two-year-old Quincey Tompkins. She was busy cofounding Plain Jane, a startup clothing company. As soon as baby Summer Tompkins was born, her father hit the road. “He basically gave some money to Susie and said, ‘Okay, you’ve been talking with your friend Jane Tise for a long time about these ideas for your own clothing line. Well, here’s some money. Why don’t you go and do it? That will give you something exciting to do while I’m gone on this trip,’” confided one friend. “It was very much a deal to make leaving his family not really easier but possible, without a sense of abandoning them.”

  Doug drove south out of San Francisco with Lito, his friend and fellow skier when they lived at Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe. Lito, a native of Bolivia, spoke Spanish and was hired as cameraman for the climbing adventure. Lito felt a deep bond with Doug—they were both passionate about life as climbers. “You literally put your life in your partner’s hands—the hands that hold the rope that will save you if all goes wrong, if you fall,” said Lito. “This immense trust leads to an immense bond.”

  In Ventura, California, they were joined by Yvon Chouinard and Richard “Dick” Dorworth, a muscled giant and a bookworm who scribbled furiously in his diaries. Dorworth was among the best downhill skiers in the world. He’d raced with Olympian Jean-Claude Killy and six years earlier had set the world record for speed skiing by topping 106 mph. A fifth climber—Chris Jones—was already in South America scaling some of the most difficult peaks in the Andes. He’d join them en route—location to be determined.

  In Los Angeles, the four “Fun Hogs” chopped off their beards, tidied sideburns, and trimmed moustaches. Mexican federales were less likely to detain and jail four gringos in a van full of camping gear if they were clean shaven. For the same reason, they took several vows: No pot. No pills. No LSD.

  Yvon designed and built custom shelving into the van to hold their climbing ropes, camp stove, skis, and winter clothing. He roped the surfboards to the roof. Their sequel to the surf movie Endless Summer was on schedule as they launched their monthslong trip to climb the unclimbed, surf the waves never surfed, and ski the snow-covered slopes of smoking volcanos in a quest to reach this mythical land they knew only from a few scattered photographs and campfire stories: Patagonia!

  In the summer of 1968, the United States was embroiled in a divisive culture war. Three months before their departure, in April, James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The ensuing riots left dozens dead and the national psyche scarred. In June, Sirhan Sirhan murdered Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles as the charismatic former attorney general celebrated his victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. As RFK prepared to inherit his brother JFK’s mantle he instead joined him in death, as another great hope gunned down. Fitz Roy seemed the perfect antithesis to US madness. It was 16,000 miles south along the Pan-American Highway, a road that, in parts, was barely more than a well-trodden cattle path. Maps of the region were often in Spanish and sparsely decorated with a road, a symbol marking a gas station, and perhaps the occasional Mayan or Incan ruin to visit.

  Two Fun Hogs sat in the front seats and two Fun Hogs in the back. Twenty-five hours of cassette tapes guaranteed that the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan would serenade them along their monthslong southern odyssey. A Nagra tape deck with speaker was rigged up to keep the van’s driver awake on long night shifts.

  Crossing the frontier into Mexico, the Fun Hogs drove to San Blas, a fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Lito set up a shot, shooting from a dune as he filmed Doug and Yvon surfing side by side. It was an uninspiring knockoff of Endless Summer and void of originality. Tompkins blamed Lito and ordered his cameraman about like an extra on a set. The Fun Hogs told Tompkins to back off. They had thousands of miles and hundreds of beaches to film. Tompkins found it hard to relax unless he was in overdrive—“as if he needs to move to prove to himself that he is still alive,” Dorworth wrote in his journal.

  In Mexico City, Tompkins found a photo lab to develop the first reels of film. He planned to ship the 16-mm masters back to the US. In case of any mishaps, the master footage would be safely stored in California. When Tompkins received the developed rolls, not a single frame was in focus—everything looked jittery, as if the camera was shaking. All their footage, including the opening scene leaving Los Angeles, crossing the border into Tijuana, and surfing in San Blas, was useless. Lito opened the camera and found that a pressure plate wasn’t holding the 16-mm film in its guides. They reset and launched again—next stop, Central America.

  Tompkins fell in love with the street food as they drove through villages, each with its open-air marketplace. Although he spoke only rudimentary Spanish, Doug wandered the markets, exploring the wealth of handwoven fabrics, local ceramics, metalwork crafts, and a culture in which handmade articles were a way of life.

  In Central America, Tompkins loved the bustle, the colors, and the spicy, exotic food. Fresh fruit was so abundant it seemed free—a pineapple cost a penny. Driving day and all night pushed them ahead of schedule. Dorworth was a machine behind the wheel. He loved to drive so much at night and seemed so immune to fatigue that Y
von wondered if Dick was secretly micro dosing LSD to keep awake.

  The van’s weak headlights and Lito’s worse eyesight made it impossibly dangerous for him to drive at night. Even during the day, Lito was a terrible driver and used only for extreme circumstances. Doug himself drove too fast, racing the engine and bouncing his buddies’ heads against the van’s metal roof, eliciting a rain of insults. “We gotta get there,” he would mumble in a tone that sounded both unsympathetic and arrogant—as if he were ignoring them.

  In Guatemala, Doug visited a fortune teller. The fortune teller’s booth consisted of three wooden bird cages and in each pen a small pile of fortunes rolled up on small pieces of paper like scrolls. After paying the nominal fee, Doug watched as the street hustler whistled to the bird, a signal to fetch a random scroll. Unrolling the fortune while Lito filmed, Doug was struck by the message—Tu Familia Te Busca (“Your Family Looks for You”).

  In the hills outside of Antigua, Guatemala, in the predawn light, the Fun Hogs were ambushed. While sleeping on the ground next to the van, Tompkins awoke to the metallic clack of a bullet being chambered. “I have my sleeping bag pulled up around my head, only my eyes in the opening,” he wrote. “I opened one eye to see what was up. A teenage soldier was pointing his automatic rifle at us, shouting in Spanish. The point of his gun is shaking as he spoke.”

  Lito, the only Fun Hog with conversational Spanish, raised his hands over his head. Speaking rapidly with the young soldiers, Lito understood that they were looking for a man they had shot the night before but who had escaped—a wanted and wounded rebel. Each Fun Hog was ordered to slowly exit his sleeping bag to prove he was intact, with no bullet wounds. Lito explained they were adventure tourists on a vacation—pointing out their blue California license plate as evidence. The Fun Hogs assured the soldiers they would report any suspicious activities. As soon as the soldiers left, the Fun Hogs broke camp, packed their goods, and hit the road. “Those were the eyes of a killer,” Dorworth wrote in his journal. “I have no doubt he wanted to shoot us.”

  The men drove nearly nonstop to Panama, where the road abruptly ended. From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the Pan-American Highway allows drivers a single route—except this stretch, known as the Darien Gap. Tropical diseases, a swamp, a daily deluge of rain, political differences, and a general lack of land-based traffic made this tiny neck of southern Panama a no-man’s-land. How would they navigate the eighty-mile gap? They reserved a ride to Buenaventura, Colombia, but the ship never arrived so they bought passage on a Spanish freighter headed to Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The change of itinerary added 1,000 miles to their trip, and Colombia was in the early stages of civil war.

  Fearing ambush from guerrillas or government forces, the Fun Hogs beelined to Ecuador, where Yvon’s briefcase was promptly stolen. The thief darted away with their paperwork, and, more damaging still, eight rolls of film they’d shot. Arriving in Peru, Tompkins was worried. Their trip was on schedule, but usable film footage was scant. Their film was in trouble. In Peru, thieves smashed the van window and attempted to steal climbing equipment and the little cash remaining. The Fun Hogs sold their surfboards for gas money. They also picked up Chris Jones, an accomplished English rock climber fresh from summiting peaks in the Peruvian Andes.

  As they left Peru and crossed into Chile, Doug and Dick felt a wave of relief. They knew Chile from their ski training trips and found the thin, spaghetti-shaped nation to be a well-run, democratic republic where “things worked” and violence was rarely a worry.

  Northern Chile is defined by the Atacama Desert—among the driest ecosystems on Earth. In areas of the desert no rainfall was recorded for over a century and daytime temperatures soar above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At night the Atacama turns chilly and, with almost no moisture in the air, holds bragging rights to the clearest skies in the world and a dazzling nightscape of stars.

  Four centuries earlier, during the Inca reign, runners sent by the rulers in Lima ran across the entire desert. Oasis to oasis, the runners carried messages to the southern reaches of the Incan empire in central Chile. The Fun Hogs debated whether their Econoline, increasingly prone to mechanical breakdown, could match the Incas and survive the 700-mile journey across the uninhabited desert. Of the van’s six cylinders, only three still fired correctly. And the Bob Dylan sticker on the back bumper became so faded that they could barely read the message—“Don’t Look Back.” Yvon oiled, babied, and tinkered with the engine, but it was clearly dying.

  Near the northern Chilean city of Iquique, the Fun Hogs camped on a cliff high above the Pacific Ocean, hoping to spot whales migrating near the coast. Tompkins was asleep when he felt the van lurch forward. “With neither warning, nor provocation, the van slipped out of gear and rolled toward the boys sleeping on the ground, and to the cliff and certain death,” he later wrote. “I managed to dive over the seat and plunged to the front floorboards, and put on the brakes with my hands, just managing to stop the van before it ran over the fellows and the cliff beyond.”

  Two days later the Econoline limped into Santiago. Yvon unscrewed, unbolted, and dissected the engine. He visited lathe shops until he found one willing to bore out the Ford engine block; then, in a weeklong show of engineering prowess, he cleaned and rebuilt the eighty-five-horsepower engine. While he and Doug labored, Chris Jones, Lito, and Dick Dorworth explored the local flea markets, purchased ropes and climbing supplies, sampled local ice cream, and observed the street marches.

  Driving south out of Santiago, their pace slowed to twenty miles per hour as the dusty Pan-American “Highway” turned into a slippery, muddy rut the color of the six-foot-thick topsoil that locals praised as “chocolate.” Changing tires was easy compared to pushing the van out of the muck. They camped surrounded by thick forests as they read aloud On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, a collection of short stories by Terry Southern.

  “The Chilean countryside is amazing,” Dorworth wrote in his diary. “It is reminiscent of Oregon and Washington and British Columbia but suddenly it is unlike anything I have seen before. Primeval. Lonely. A harmony in patterns and colors of green. Something left over from a more innocent, therefore wild time of the earth.”

  Doug stared at the landscape, which over the course of a single day’s drive had morphed from lush green paradise to gray wreckage. Settlers known as colonos had hacked away thick forests, clearing land for cattle and homesteads. Roadside stumps and trees sawed off at shoulder height were aged remnants of a massive forest fire. Thousands of trees lay toppled on the ground; it appeared as if a brutal wind had slapped down the entire forest. Pilots flying over the area said it looked as if a giant had scattered thousands of matchsticks across the countryside. Some farmers gathered the scattered trunks and used the wreckage as firewood, but in many areas fields of jagged silhouettes stood tall, gray ghosts from what Dorworth surmised was “some great fire of another age.”

  Hundreds of miles south of Santiago, the Fun Hogs approached Volcano Llaima and made plans to climb to its smoking crater at 10,250 feet and then ski thousands of feet down the flanks. Covered in thick snow, Llaima looked like an ideal slope. But since poisonous fumes and smoke billowed from the crater, it was doubtful that they could reach the peak. Carrying skis, oversized ski backpacks, and walking in lace-up leather ski boots, the men trekked toward the crater—and noted the rocks were warmer the higher they trudged.

  After climbing for eight hours, the men circled the lip of the crater and approached from the south. A stiff breeze blew the deadly fumes due north. “We were able to stick our ski poles out over the lip,” said Tompkins. As Lito filmed, Doug and Dick skied the fresh powder side by side, carving neat turns as Yvon cartwheeled behind them—a mix of crossed ski tips, upended poles, and curses. An intermediate skier, Chris Jones kept discreetly out of the camera frame. For a week they climbed, skied, and filmed. Then, short of cash, they sold their skis for $95—a needed infusion for goods and gas.
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  Arriving in the southern port city of Puerto Montt, Doug went to work as a forger. He cut a deal with the owners of a Chilean print shop, gleefully explaining to the law-abiding and conservative locals that he’d lost his original paperwork for Argentine customs. He needed help creating a replacement customs stamp. Would they help? Together they could dupe Chile’s rivals on the other side of the Andes: the flamboyant and pompous Argentines. Tompkins returned time and time again to improve the counterfeit stamp. The final product was near-perfect and only cost three dollars.

  From Puerto Montt, the men took a tiny ferry (capacity: two cars) across a frigid lake set in a fjord framed by snow-topped mountains. It looked like a postcard from Norway. The diesel boat was barely seaworthy, and the engine stalled so often the Fun Hogs wondered if they would be marooned on the remote lakeshore. The untouched green forests appeared void of human presence. No roads, no towns, no signs of settlement. The owners, often wealthy families in Santiago who had inherited land grants, were rarely present or aware of what they owned. The soil was too damp for farming or grazing and the lakes too cold for bathing. Fishing, however, was outstanding. Eastern brook trout—the national fish of Nova Scotia and New Hampshire—imported by anglers decades earlier, had adapted all too well in the nutrient-rich waters. The aggressive trout (part of the salmon family) ate out the local fish, colonized the rivers and lakes, and as measured in biomass soon accounted for 80 percent of all regional fish.

  Preparing to cross the border into Argentina, the Fun Hogs toasted their fake rubber stamp in hopes it would work. Then the men celebrated—their falsified paperwork had fooled the authorities. They had smuggled the van into Argentina without having to post a $6,000 bond, which they would have to forfeit if they sold it (which they planned to).