A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  In Argentina they found empty roads and clear weather, so they tore across the pampa. The flat, overgrazed grasslands reminded them of the American Southwest. The land was patrolled by lone cowboys riding with bedroll and gun, trailed by a pack of dogs. Here the land was dry, hot, and empty. Much of the rain fell on the Chilean side of the mountains. Occasional flocks of wild, ostrich-like rheas trotted across the flatlands, but there were few other signs of wildlife. Desolate frontier outposts offered dozens of veterinary medicines for sheep and cattle but little more than basic provisions for humans. Chouinard spotted a shovel used to feed coal into the iron stoves so common in the region and recognized the value of the short-handled, sharp-bladed spade. Remembering the French account of building ice caves, he purchased two for their upcoming mountain climb.

  Arriving in the touristy Bariloche—known to some as “the region’s Jackson Hole”—they found a neat and orderly city built on the southern shores of the clear blue lake Nahuel Huapí. Bariloche felt distinctly German or Austrian, as bakeries offered kuchen and strudel. Fancy homes were built from blocks of cut stone adorned with thick wooden beams and topped in steeply slanted roofs to shed the occasional deep snowfall. “Steaks are too cheap to afford anything else and the candy is outrageously good,” Dorworth noted. The men sheltered in Refugio Frei, a hut at the base of Cerro Catedral, and started climbing. “We adopted the same strict steak diet that boxers do, anticipating lean times ahead,” noted Tompkins.

  The climbers were terribly out of shape. Bouncing in the van, eating ice cream, and working on the engine had done little to prepare them for the upcoming challenges of Fitz Roy. Dorworth in particular needed to tune up—his entire rock-climbing experience was just a few months in Yosemite, and there was still some doubt whether he’d be invited all the way to summit. Given his superhuman strength and gloriously elegant skiing, Dorworth wondered if he was just a Sherpa and a poster boy for the movie. Training with Chouinard in the mountains around Bariloche, Dorworth learned quickly. He was a phenomenal athlete and drawn to the challenges. “Climbing teaches a man to protect himself against his own possible mistakes,” he wrote in his journal.

  * * *

  Climbing has many, many elements to it that other sports don’t offer. The risk factor causes us to judge and carefully weigh the risk against the circumstances that you’re in. That is, the conditions and what that risk is worth. And to evaluate your skills and ability to pass through the risky area safely. And learn how to avoid and minimize the risks so they don’t kill you. But knowing that shit happens in the elements and misjudgment can be very costly. . . . You don’t know what life is until you have seen death. So you get right up to the edge. It teaches you about pain and privation and how to endure those things—there are times for intense concentration and then times for intense reflection. . . . It fit into my sense of what balanced living is about. . . . It’s outside the material world of desire.

  —DOUG TOMPKINS

  * * *

  Lito found climbing to be hypnotic. “Climbing requires one to be totally alert, totally present, totally responsible,” he said. “We were lucky. Doug and I never lived through any terrible dramatic moments, never survived any near-death experiences, on our climbs. We paid attention; we were bold but careful.”

  Resting in Bariloche, the men bathed, shaved, and restocked food supplies. Calling home was an intricate affair involving various delays, connections by operators in Argentina and the United States. For every minute he spoke to Susie, Doug paid a small fortune, so he tried to keep the calls brief. But Susie was ecstatic as she explained that her little dress company had struck it rich. A dress that partner Jane designed was featured in a full-page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle. Follow-up orders were swamping the company. “I need your help!” she pleaded. Tompkins bought an airplane ticket from Bariloche to San Francisco. He packed a change of clothes into a small bag and told the Fun Hogs he was leaving.

  The other men were stunned. On the eve of the key scenes for their movie, the director was leaving? To see his wife on the other side of the world? Tompkins was adamant and firm. It was important, and it would only take a week.

  Tompkins faced an existential crisis as he boarded the flight home. He had no income, little savings, and two small children. For Susie, the rigors of living alone for months with their two young daughters while running a small business meant she was working triple time. Parenting was never Doug’s forte. He was absent from his daughters’ lives for months on end, and “frenetic” was a polite way of describing his idea of a family getaway. Susie needed help. And to complicate the picture further, Doug had promised Susie he was making an iconic film. He was nowhere near that, and knew it.

  When he arrived in San Francisco, Susie told Doug the full story. Joseph Magnin, San Francisco’s luxury department store, had featured a dress from its “Plain Jane” collection in a newspaper ad. When readers saw the advertisement, everyone wanted the dress. Demand soared. Joseph Magnin asked for hundreds of dresses. The $15,000 order (roughly $100,000 in 2021 dollars) hurtled Plain Jane from selling out of the back of the station wagon into a small company with tiny offices and start up staff.

  Using contacts gained during his three years building The North Face, Doug launched into a crash course on clothing production. Jane Tise and Susie were working nonstop from a small, two-bedroom flat. Doug joined them and, packed together, they brainstormed. Who could sew so many dresses so fast? Doug investigated Chinatown. Susie fancied she had an idea about where to source the wholesale fabrics. Jane designed the clothes. “It was real mom-and-pop,” said April Stark, who worked as Jane’s assistant. “Jane would sketch a dress, and they had a pattern maker, very astute guy. He’d make the patterns up.”

  The kitchen table at Tise’s apartment was used for cutting. In a small office above a massage parlor in San Francisco, Tompkins helped amp up the dress production. Doug careened between Chinatown, where he peered into alleyway sewing shops, and the city’s financial district, where he parlayed the purchase order into a quick loan.

  After a week, it was time for Doug to return to South America. The Fun Hogs were expecting him. But as the Fun Hogs packed up their bags and prepared to hit the road, Tompkins fired off a telegram. ONE WEEK MORE. STILL WORKING. ALL GOOD. DOUG. The Fun Hogs were furious. “Jones is pissed. Yvon is down and disgusted. I am disappointed,” Dorworth wrote in his journal while downing beers at the Munich Bar in Bariloche. “Tompkins at times shows a profound lack of consideration for others. In this case, his friends.”

  When Tompkins returned to Bariloche, he hardly bothered to make an excuse. Instead he acted like he was the one in a rush. The Fun Hogs abandoned Bariloche and drove south through El Bolson, past Los Alerces National Park into an ever-more-desolate landscape. The few human settlements were pioneer cowboy outposts and massive sheep farms, with hardly more than a single trading post for miles. Slowly they drove along the rutted and potholed road toward Fitz Roy. After eleven flat tires and 180 back-jarring miles, they spotted Fitz Roy. “Our hearts rose and sunk,” Tompkins wrote.

  * * *

  We weren’t prepared for it. Thousands of miles of driving, three and a half months on the march wasn’t enough! Had we somehow made a mistake? We hadn’t known it would be like this! So big, so beautiful! So scary! This was a gigantic Chamonix, a gargantuan Bugaboos. Huge was our only impression and we were sixty miles across the plain. To the south of the range, at the end of Lago Viedma, spilling into this lake, more than sixty miles long, was a Himalayan-sized glacier! Those first few minutes were perhaps the most mentally debilitating of the whole trip. A strong fear, a sense of losing confidence, came over me, like the way you feel when coming to Yosemite to climb a big route on El Cap; you drive in and suddenly see the wall. I’m going up there? you ask. Wait a minute. Should I? Can I?

  —DOUG TOMPKINS

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  The Snow Cave

  You never know how an adventure wil
l influence the rest of your life. I spent a total of thirty-one days confined to a snow cave. I had skewered my knee with an ice axe cutting ice for the stove. I stayed on my back staring at a gloomy ceiling of ice inches above my face. Every time we started the stove the walls dripped onto our down sleeping bags, which became useless wet lumps. I turned thirty years old inside that cave; it was a low point in my life.

  —YVON CHOUINARD

  The dirt track heading around Lago Viedma toward the distant spires of the Fitz Roy range petered out at a river, the Rio de las Vueltas, before reaching the mountains. A shaky suspension bridge allowed the Fun Hogs to cross the river, but this was the end of the road for their faithful van. From here they would walk. “Pack horses are the only way to get to the mountain, and then our own two legs,” Tompkins wrote. “So, we thought very carefully about what we would really need.”

  A chance encounter with Lt. Silveira of the Argentine Army scored them free packhorses for the trek through a national park, all the way to the forest at the base of Fitz Roy. Using the military horses they saved dozens of trips ferrying gear and provisions on their backs. Tompkins was delighted. Sporting a flat-brimmed Chilean huaso hat, he threw a duffel bag over his shoulders and, as Lito filmed, he skipped over the rickety suspension bridge spanning a river that already carried a tragic history. The men knew that it was here that one of the climbers in the French expedition had been swept to his death in the strong current. A sharp spire of granite beside Fitz Roy was named in honor of the drowned French climber. “Poincenot Needle” was a reminder that despite its beauty, Patagonia could also be deadly. But today the mood was light. Halfway across the bridge Tompkins jumped, grabbed a guy wire, and knocked out a set of pullups. He flashed a grin ear to ear.

  One full day’s hike above the river, the Fun Hogs began organizing their base camp on the same spot used by Lionel Terray and the pioneering 1954 French expedition. Tompkins marveled at the nuggets of history they unearthed, rusted cans filled with dirt, and remnants of an oven that Yvon would put to good use, baking bread. Base camp was deep in a native beech forest, just below a world of snow, ice, and rock.

  The men left base camp and began to scout their route up Fitz Roy by hiking past an icy lake, Lago de los Tres, at the base of Fitz Roy’s skirt of glaciers and snowfields. They found easy going up the long, steep snow slopes until they hit a barrier of cliffs, blocking access to the Piedras Blancas glacier. This was the “white highway” that would lead the climbers still higher to the beginning of the serious technical climbing. They found a notch in this first cliff band, the so-called Passo Superiore. Here the upper mountain was suddenly revealed, and there they decided to situate their first camp. On a large mountain, climbers often pitch tents to create a series of camps leading them to the top—but not on Fitz Roy. Patagonian winds would shred the strongest tents. The few earlier expeditions to the area had discovered a solution: seek refuge in caves carved into the snow banks. It took strenuous days of digging and numerous round trips from base camp, hauling loads up to the pass which provided access to the route above—but eventually the Fun Hogs excavated a cave to withstand the harshest weather.

  Their next step was to cross the wide Piedras Blancas glacier at the foot of the final granite tower of Fitz Roy. The glacier required little more than a patient but careful slog. They only crossed the glacier roped up, in case one of the climbers broke through a hidden snow bridge over a crevasse. Four separate times Tompkins slipped into a crevasse, and twice he fell in over his head and was held by the rope. Fitz Roy was well defended.

  The Piedras Blancas glacier ended under a massive stone buttress that jutted from the soaring granite lines of the final peak. On top of this ridge-like buttress, known as Silla, or “Chair,” the climbers carved a second ice cave, a secure high camp from which they could launch their final climb. Yvon led the crucial pitch, and soon the whole team was standing on top of the Silla, gazing up at a final 3,000 feet of vertical granite, the true challenge of Fitz Roy.

  Fearing a change in weather, the Fun Hogs started excavating a second ice cave. In Patagonian climbing, everything depends on the weather, which on Fitz Roy ranged between brutal and slightly less brutal. The men worked for hours to dig, enlarge, and reinforce the second cave. Without shelter, no one could imagine surviving even a single night on the exposed ridge of Fitz Roy. Pacific storms regularly piled in from the coast, then slammed into the vertical mountainside. Dorworth joked that it was the only place he’d seen snow rising from the valley and flying up a mountain! The threatening weather made the final summit push a very calculated gamble. They couldn’t race for the summit until they had stocked their two ice-cave camps with days of food, cooking gas, and enough canned food to survive if a major storm trapped them up on the mountain. A week’s worth of supplies in each ice cave seemed about right.

  The climb was now an exercise in endurance. Back and forth they cached their supplies. Hauling loads up to the first cave through deep snow, and then on to their high base on the Silla, all the while, they filmed any promising scene. Many days felt more like a frustrating slog than an alpine adventure. Patience frayed, tempers grew short. Doug, the most highly motivated member of the group, was also the most frustrated.

  Then the team unity created by sharing meals, inside jokes, the camaraderie of a cramped van, all exploded. During a filming sequence on the glacier, an argument ensued when Lito did not respond fast enough to an order from Doug, who screamed at him. Lito put down the camera and refused to keep filming. Tompkins shoved him, grabbed the camera, and marched down the mountain. Before he left, Tompkins picked up Jones’s travel diary and scribbled out a goodbye letter. Their movie was over.

  Tompkins was irate as he accused the team of being lazy. “Today is about as low as I ever want to be . . .” began his four-page diatribe. “I can tell you I am sick inside, really sick, not only for you guys but for me too. I lose the most actually.” Tompkins mourned for more fluid teamwork. “It is just bitching when everyone is functioning and no grumbles or complaints, expeditions especially require that when things have to be done, they get done.” He strode off across the dangerous crevasse field with no spare food, no rope, and taking with him the movie camera. Before sunset he was back. Chagrined, he called a group meeting and asked for opinions. Dorworth laid it out. “Revolting! The way you treat Lito—that just can’t happen.”

  Tompkins paused and said, “Got it.”

  “And from that moment I never saw it,” said Dorworth referring to the “Therapy Session” that the Fun Hogs held outside their ice cave. “He never treated Lito bad again. It was like he incorporated the message in two seconds. It was the most amazing transformation I have ever seen.” With the team together again, and after days climbing up and down to stock their camps, the Fun Hogs needed a break in the weather—one day to make a dash for the summit.

  Inside the second snow cave the Fun Hogs waited. And waited. But the weather wasn’t cooperating. Every day a new storm whirled in, fed by moisture from the Pacific Ocean and the Southern Patagonia Ice Field. The men wrote in their journals, and described favorite dishes in luscious bites, even developing an all-star compilation of plates from favorite restaurants. Yvon read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as Doug, Lito, and Chris played a local card game known as Truco.

  Yvon, always the designer, mended equipment with his Speedy Stitcher Awl. He patched worn boots and frayed jackets and was constantly tinkering with the length of his gaiters and the sharpness of the crampons attached to his boots. Chouinard took over the cooking duties for the whole team, melting snow for water and preparing their minimally adequate meals and occasional hot drinks. Gathering water became a key task. Taking turns, they collected chunks of snow and ice. Yvon went out to chop some ice to melt for water, and had a glancing blow. “I stuck the pick of my ice axe into my kneecap,” he said. “Down deep. It probably cut some tendons in there. It was really, really painful. . . . Nobody could have done anything fo
r me . . . unless they were a surgeon.”

  The temperature was stuck at freezing, which staunched blood flow but did little to promote the formation of scar tissue. Tompkins and Chouinard had studied self-hypnotization and they liked to use it as a party trick or around the campfire. Now Tompkins desperately tried to move Chouinard out of the pain zone. They talked about how they’d run their lives—free, wild, and independent. As their entombment stretched out day after day, snowfall buried the ice cave entrance. “It’s a half-light situation, and it’s cold. It’s exactly thirty-two degrees. It’s wet,” said Chouinard.

  The biggest challenge was to wait. To kill time they told stories. Conversations were long, rambling, and covered everything the Fun Hogs could think of, but often returned to life post-trip. What lay next? “One of Chouinard’s drives was, ‘I got to make some money. Must make some bread. I’m just spinning my wheels,’” remembered Jones. “And Doug was giving him advice. Doug was pushing him.”

  Tompkins convinced Chouinard that hard goods (like ice hammers and pitons) were such great products that a single item might last ten years. Doug explained that selling shirts and pants was a repeat business. “That’s why Yvon got into the ‘soft goods’ business, because Doug convinced him,” said Jones.

  Trapped in the ice cave, the Fun Hogs began to look like five cavemen. Ragged beards trailed off their jaws in wild curls and spikes. They had no showers, no soap, no deodorant, and no story untold. Pledges were made and vows taken. Among the promises made in that cave was an understanding between Doug and Yvon. They were both hardscrabble entrepreneurs who detested authority. “Whatever the business,” they swore in effect, “keep full control.” “Never go public. Never dilute.” Business wasn’t about maximizing wealth; business was more closely linked to mental health and a desire to sleep well, explore the wilds of the world, and spontaneously surf for an afternoon or a month. “Never take a job that doesn’t give you at least four months off a year,” Chouinard wrote. Tompkins agreed. The game was to maintain control over the business, not let it take control over you.