A Wild Idea Read online

  In the basement Chouinard stored boxes of climbing equipment that he hammered out at his beachside forge in Ventura, California. A mechanical whiz and precise builder, Chouinard banged out rock-climbing gear and when he went to Yosemite, the trunk of his car was stuffed with pitons and climbing gear. The tribe of climbers could be counted on to spend their few dog-eared dollars on a reliable tool from Chouinard Equipment. Doug helped his buddy with wholesale orders, as Yvon was stuck with a three-year US Army tour of duty and couldn’t manage the business while deployed in Korea. Yvon was finally getting out of the army but was stuck in limbo and spent his days killing time working cleanup duty at the nearby Presidio Army Base in San Francisco.

  Although he had little cash for inventory and no cash for marketing, Doug anticipated the rising popularity of outdoor travel and adventure, so he set about stocking his small store with trendsetting designs and innovative gear. A trickle of repeat customers passed the word—The North Face was special. “The big hits were the reindeer skin rugs, which were a novelty item and flew out like hotcakes,” said Duncan Dwelle, the first store manager at The North Face. “Then, the striped fishermen’s sweaters. And the bikinis. They were completely unrelated! They were illustrative of Doug’s vision of merchandising. His vision was that we were trying to present a style. But he couldn’t articulate it. I don’t think he really understood it at all, then. But what he was selling was a sense of style. I was much more explicit about it—regarding mountaineering and backpacking. The style was: if you go light, you’ll have more fun.”

  As accomplished climbers and explorers, both Doug and Yvon mocked equipment junkies. They gagged at the proliferation of nonessential gadgets. According to their credo, anything that wasn’t practical was dead weight. They were not dilettantes; they were obsessed climbers: gritty, unshaven members of a tribe known affectionally as “dirtbags.” They were hardcore outdoor enthusiasts who whittled down the handle of a toothbrush to lighten the load.

  Despite its unusual location sandwiched between bars and strip clubs, The North Face shop drew crowds. The walls were adorned with dramatic photographs of downhill ski racers. The wooden signs, carved by hand, suggested a personal touch. Customers strolled across a woolen green carpet and past skis set against the whorled grain of redwood shelving. A display shelf arranged and labeled Yvon’s hand-forged pitons and carabiners as if they were artifacts from a long-lost culture. Sleeping bags dangled from the ceiling. Pedestrians popped in to gawk. This place had an aura, and many visitors studied the product display cases as if they were strolling through a museum. The poet Allen Ginsberg was a regular visitor. He lived in the neighborhood, hung out at the City Lights bookstore, and felt taken by the beauty of The North Face store. He seemed enchanted by an oversized Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite National Park. “Ginsberg stared and stared at the pictures of El Capitan,” said Lito Tejada-Flores, a ski instructor who worked part time for his friend Doug at The North Face. Said Lito, “Ginsberg never understood how anyone could dare scale that.”

  “We were all sort of social rejects, Chouinard and these guys. We were the guys who didn’t really want to make it in high school,” said one Yosemite climber, Joe McKeown. “I didn’t play football or wrestle. I’d come back from a summer of climbing in Yosemite in the early ’60s, and the football coach would come over and say, ‘What’s the matter, McKeown, you yellow son of a bitch—aren’t you going to try out for the football team?’”

  “We were more climbers than we were ’60s hippies. There was interesting stuff happening. But that wasn’t us. We were on our own trip,” said Lito. “Climbing is an obsessive passion. It’s more than a sport. Tennis is a sport, but when you’re a climber, you’re committed to it because it’s exciting and meaningful and thrilling.”

  Yvon, Doug, and Lito spent days at a time in Yosemite Valley. They slept at Camp 4, a rambunctious campsite for climbers and a perpetual headache for National Park Service administrators. Climbing by day, stealing away from park rangers by night, they felt like outlaws and called themselves “The Valley Cong”—an ideological tip of the hat to peasants resisting the US invasion of Vietnam and the carpet bombing that killed more than two million civilians. “Climbing is the exhilaration of good health,” Tompkins told an interviewer. “You have to go out and exercise and get the body going to do those things to feel the exhilaration of being healthy. The blood is going around and when you get that feeling, it’s reinforcing and you can do it again. You get into a cycle.”

  Although he was far from being a full-time member, Tompkins earned respect from the Camp 4 tribe on a four-day ascent of Yosemite’s Salathé Wall where he followed Yvon’s lead. It was only the fourth time that the 3,000-foot wall had been climbed.

  Inside Yosemite Valley, as he navigated smooth granite slabs, Doug felt energized. The life-threatening, edgy challenges of rock climbing melded his exceptional coordination and balance with a love for spontaneity. Real-time problem solving and finding a first-ever route to a summit was exhilarating. “Doug and Yvon used to talk about walking all two hundred and ten miles of the John Muir trail in an overcoat with only the food they could carry in their pockets,” said Dwelle, The North Face store manager, who was often stuck back in North Beach filling out orders and inventory to keep the business running.

  Yvon and Doug traveled extensively together. They climbed in British Columbia, the Swiss Alps, and the Scottish Cairngorms. Perpetually short of money, they hitchhiked and camped; rarely did they have funds to pay for lodging. Yvon was jailed for seventeen days in Winslow, Texas, when local police yanked him off a passing freight train and found he had no job, no cash, and no firm plans. “We used to sleep in the Goodwill donation boxes,” Yvon said with a laugh. “It was warm with all those clothes, but you’d get woke up whenever people dumped a fresh box of used clothes on top of you.”

  “Yvon is a quiet, reflective, introverted person,” said Dwelle. “Doug is exactly the opposite—a natural-born leader, one in a billion. Extremely charismatic, energetic, full of imagination and ideas. He didn’t believe rules pertained to him. Once when he was out biking with several friends, he ran a red light, and a cop chased him down and said, ‘Why didn’t you stop?’ Doug said, ‘I thought I could outrun you.’”

  Douglas Rainsford Tompkins was christened and bred to be anything but a rock climbing dirtbag. Born to descendants from the Mayflower and raised in New York City’s Greenwich Village, as a small child his world shone with fine art and antiques. His father, John “Jack” Tompkins, was a glider pilot during World War II who owned a high-end antique furniture business. Jack traveled the United States in his small airplane, and as a youngster Doug sat atop a cushion in the copilot’s seat. He could decipher navigation maps while still in middle school. Steering for minutes at a time, Doug flew with his father cross-country as they examined, evaluated, and purchased museum-quality wooden furniture.

  Shadowing his father, Doug developed an eye for discovering hidden treasures. In a New England church, Jack inspected a prized refectory table while the clergyman bantered about the value of the piece. Jack just shook his head, no. He looked at the priest and declared, “You don’t know how much this table is worth and I do. And what you’re asking for that table is not close to what it’s worth. I’ve got to pay you more. Here’s how much I will be paying you for this table, and I’m still going to do fine.” The stunned clergyman accepted a sum far higher than his asking price. As father and son drove back to New York, the elder Tompkins lectured his son that “the only really good business deals are when it works out well for both sides.”

  With a fine eye for the masterpiece in a collection, Jack Tompkins earned enough money to move the family into farmlands north of Manhattan. They settled in Millbrook, New York, where the neighborhood included Harvard professor Timothy Leary and his infamous LSD crash pad. Rambunctious and entrepreneurial, young Doug was a handful. Faith McCellan, his mother, once tied him to a tree at the beach to keep him from escaping
while the family was enjoying the seaside. Doug showed a knack for inventing projects—not only did he love to raise animals but by the age of eight he was converting his flock of chickens into his own business selling eggs. Apart from his brood of chickens, he also raised sheep with such care and attention to details that he regularly snatched up the blue ribbons at the county fair. Business was in his blood. So was a deep competitive streak. On the athletic fields he excelled as a star athlete.

  The Tompkins farm housed geese, horses, goats, and rabbits. Set back from the road and surrounded by acres of pastures and pine forests, the New England, country-style home was furnished with antiques that guests were encouraged to pick through—and perhaps even purchase. Family friends and trusted insiders understood that the sequence of numbers and letters on the bottom of each item, a bit like Roman numerals, were actually coded price tags. During dinner parties and after cocktails, Jack and Faith in effect hawked the furnishings in their home.

  Doug’s father was a Calvinistic taskmaster. Praise from him was sparse. Yet Jack was proud of his genteel living. In a pink-red riding jacket, he assumed the image of an English lord out on a fox hunt. His private airplane and long driveway epitomized his tendency to embrace the illusion of boundless lands. “Never buy a house where you can see neighbors,” he cautioned young Doug without understanding how that lesson would shape his son’s destiny.

  Jack taught Doug the secrets to evaluating antiques. Jack regularly cited a book that illustrated examples of furniture and used photographs to show how every antique could be divided into one of just three categories: the good, the bad, and the exceptional. He made Doug study it. Doug devoured the book and, at a young age, memorized large parts of it, which honed a keen eye for composition and beauty, an aesthetic taste that would sculpt the contours of his life.

  The lucrative family antique business reaped benefits, including upgrades to the family automobile and family airplane with enough money left over to send nine-year-old Doug to Indian Mountain, a boarding school in nearby Connecticut that offered a renaissance education along the lines of the ideals of Ancient Greece. At school, Doug read French, wrote Latin, analyzed newspapers, and debated current affairs. At his eighth-grade graduation, he earned honors as the top athlete at the sports-heavy academy.

  For high school, his parents enrolled Doug at Pomfret, a Connecticut boarding school with a well-trodden path into Ivy League universities. Doug’s aristocratic grooming was on schedule until a rock climbing trip upset his parents’ carefully laid plans. “Somebody took me rock climbing as a kid,” he explained. “It was a woman, actually. She was having a marital affair with a ski instructor over in the Catskill Mountains. She took me along as a decoy,” he added. “She said she was taking me rock climbing, but she was really going to see this guy. He taught me how to climb. Since I was there, he had to! And then I fell in with all the climbers there. They were socially progressive, from the left side of the political spectrum. In some ways they were early ‘greens.’ Climbing, of course, got me out in the wild outdoors and connected me with the nature tradition. That sent me in another direction. That changed the course of my life completely.”

  Climbing also introduced him to Yvon Chouinard, whom he met while he was in high school and climbing in the Shawangunks, in upstate New York. Tompkins fell in with a group of rebel climbers who became addicted to life in the “Gunks.” They called themselves The Vulgarian Mountain Club in homage to their affinity for disrupting the local social norms.

  Once hooked, Doug spent every possible weekend rock climbing on ever more difficult routes. He learned to fix ropes, rappel down a cliff, and hammer pitons into the rock face. In high school Tompkins skipped school on Mondays. Three-day weekends became standard as he stole an extra day to climb or ski—and took another step toward expulsion.

  On the ski slopes, he was a skilled daredevil. Schussing straight down the mountainside or weaving through the gates, whether in downhill or slalom, Doug won race after race. He told classmates he was headed to the 1964 Winter Olympics. School, he declared, slowed him down. Why attend classes if he could rock climb and downhill ski? Doug was infamous for being the only one in his class to drive cross-country (without a driver’s license) as he escaped with older friends to climb at Devil’s Towers in South Dakota. He was not yet sixteen years old.

  Just weeks before his high school graduation, Doug was expelled. Rumors suggested that he had pawned antique furniture belonging to the school and kept the cash. His parents were stunned. So was Tompkins. He was free.

  “My parents wanted me to go to college,” he said. “But by that time, it was too late. I was ready to see the world rather than sit in a classroom. I just quit school. I took high-paying jobs, what we called ‘booming.’ I was a boomer. I worked hard for a short period of time on logging crews as a feller. I saved money and then I took off.”

  Tompkins spent three summers chopping down huge trees. He strapped on a leather contraption to each lower leg and, using climbing spikes, jabbed his way up the trunk until he was about a hundred feet high. Tompkins then sawed away branches and cut off the treetop. With ropes and saws flapping about, he bounced from one perch to another, delighted with the opportunity for aerial gymnastics. Once the trunk was cleared of branches Tompkins felled the old-growth tree into the underbrush. He excelled at tree felling. In many ways the challenge was an echo of the skills he used in rock climbing. Felling provided a bird’s-eye view of the forests—then called “virgin timber”—and put wads of cash in his pocket. When his supervisors noted his agility in the trees, they hired him to plant explosives. At times they needed to place dynamite charges to blow away rock formations and build roads. They learned that Doug’s fearlessness allowed him to take on the dynamite missions with gusto. “Dad and I thought we’d starve him out,” confessed Faith, his mother. “We said, ‘Okay, do what you have to do, but we won’t pay one cent. If you go to college, we pay everything.’ It didn’t work! He never set one foot in college.”

  Baling hay in Montana for a season, Doug learned to heave the forty-pound loads around, and added a sheath of muscles to his arms and chest. Perpetually tanned and grizzled, Doug cut a dashing figure as he changed from lumberjack garb to party clothes. Any job that could bring him closer to the outdoors was worth taking. He worked as a janitor at the famed Jerome Hotel when Aspen was still a wild outpost in Colorado, and he gained access to the slopes and the winter ski racing circuit ranging from the Rockies to California’s Squaw Valley. “He was a really good ski racer. When he set his mind to doing something, he was focused on it,” said Billy Kidd, the Olympic skier who raced with Tompkins during the late ’50s and early ’60s. “In the summers, we went to Portillo in Chile [where it was winter] and trained for months,” said Kidd, who shared carousing motorcycle rides in the Chilean Andes with Tompkins just before winning the world championship and becoming the first American to win an Olympic medal in downhill skiing.

  During a break in their training, Tompkins and Kidd convinced a local BMW outlet to lend them two motorcycles. They blasted around town until they had an accident and scrambled to hide the evidence. “They spent all night cleaning the bike up and using shoe polish to cover the patches,” said Tom Brokaw, the journalist who loved to travel with Doug. “They wheeled the bikes into the dealership and took off. The next day there was an All Point Bulletin out for them. Doug knew [an influential] family in Chile and they got him out of it.”

  After completing ski training in Chile, Doug hitchhiked by airplane throughout South America. Instead of flying a commercial flight home, the teenage high school dropout staked out South America’s small municipal airports and chatted up their air traffic controllers. When a small plane was less than full, Tompkins sold himself as an experienced navigator. With that trick, he flew free on flights from Chile to Peru and into Colombia as he pinballed his way home. In the Amazon jungle near Iquitos, Peru, he worked for a research team that valued his climbing skills. They sent him into the t
rees to catch monkeys.

  “If he really had set his mind on making it to the Olympics as a ski racer, then it would take something like a knee injury to keep him from accomplishing that goal,” said Kidd, who knew Tompkins from competitions in New England. “And, unfortunately, in ski racing, you have a lot of injuries, and especially in those days when we had wooden skis and leather boots, and the release factor in the bindings was only when the screws ripped out of the ski.”

  Claude Suhl, a fellow climber, described Tompkins as once suffering an injury that slowed his path and knocked him out of the elite competition. At the time, Tompkins could still ski, but not at the level that provided a shot at the 1964 Olympics. He was not invited to join the US downhill ski team. Fueled by his fierce athletic talents and an obsession to win, Tompkins focused on rock climbing and founded California Mountain Guide Service (CMGS), a prelude to outdoor education programs like NOLS, the National Outdoor Leaderships School, formed three years later.

  The instructors at CMGS were highly regarded climbers, including Chuck Pratt, Tom Frost, Royal Robbins, and best buddy Yvon Chouinard. To market CMGS, Tompkins designed a catalog featuring photographs of the mountains they would climb. Despite the elegant brochure, his clients were classic dirtbags that one friend described as “little more than high school students packed into a battered van.” As Tompkins promoted his climbing school, so many friends and clients peppered him with questions about equipment that he decided to open a small business. From inside a garage in Berkeley, Doug sold camping and climbing equipment. “He couldn’t stand still,” said Yvon. “He was very entrepreneurial and was always coming up with ideas. I don’t know if he was a great businessman, but he was willing to take risks and try new things. He doesn’t take advice too easily and he never liked anybody telling him what to do and hated authority, so he was pretty much going solo on a lot of this stuff.”