Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

by Rick Ridgeway

“Commit and Then Figure It Out.”

“We don’t just talk about doing stuff,” Yvon said. “We do it.”

To a remarkable degree, the Do Boys were successful not only in outdoor sports but also in business. The professional side of our lives, however, was never the central defining attribute of who we were, and Doug and Yvon in particular disparaged the label “businessman.”

In mountaineering—and in business—it’s not about taking risks but managing risks.

interacting with remote cultures in remote parts of the world was as appealing as the climbs themselves.

I earned money for my expeditions painting houses, and I was conscious that Chris had a profession and I did not. Not that he ever emphasized it; in fact, he prided himself on wearing secondhand clothing, driving old cars, and living in low-rent apartments. He encouraged me to think twice about trading the liberty of my odd-job life for what he considered the chains of responsibility attendant to a professional career.

When I look at the photograph, I sometimes think of the three of us that morning, each in our own way grateful for the privilege of bearing witness to the majesty of the wild world. In the years that followed, all three of us would remain loyal to our passion for climbing high mountains in remote places, but I alone would survive. I remember Chris’s grin, the way he tried to laugh away the burdens of his life, and Jonathan’s smile, the way it reflected how he had learned, at an early age, to avoid an attachment to gain or fear of loss.

“Someday, we should come back to the Himalaya,” Jonathan said. “You and me. We’ll go to a monastery and spend a couple of weeks there, meditating.”

“He says it is very good we have a successful expedition,” Nima translated. “He tells me that the expedition job is very good, and it’s good that I follow this work even though it is dangerous. But he says that’s why we get paid so much.” “Ask him why he thinks we sahibs come here to try and climb Everest,” I said. Nima asked the old Sherpa. “He says it’s because you make much money, become famous, write many books.” “Tell him that many sahibs climb mountains like Everest because they like adventure, that they like to be away from cities and buildings and trek and climb in remote places where few men have been before.” Nima translated, and the old Sherpa laughed and gave his answer to Nima. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.

“I’m gonna get some exercise,” Dick announced. “Gonna go on a hike. Down to Namche. Visit with the trekkers, meet some folks.” “You can’t do that,” Frank replied. “That’s going the wrong way. We’re supposed to be gaining altitude, not losing it. You’ve got to have respect. This is Everest!” “Frank, you’re always courtin’ trouble by anticipatin’ it. That’s ’cause you’re a lawyer. Trained to look at all the negatives. This is a mountain, not a courtroom. I’m just gonna take the problems as they come. Since there’s no problems at the time bein’, I’m gonna head down-valley and get some leg stretchin’, do some sight seein’.”

but the obstacles didn’t stop.

The challenge seemed insurmountable. After spending sixty-eight days above 18,000 feet to climb K2, I thought I knew something about tenacity, but Frank simply refused to take any setback as anything other than a challenge that had to have a solution. He made a deal with the Chileans to parachute a dozen fuel drums onto the glacier next to their base on the Antarctic Peninsula. Giles said it would be easy to land there and pump the fuel from the drums into the Tri-Turbo. “I’ve been reading about Shackleton,” Frank told me, “and I found a quote I like. ‘Difficulties are just things to overcome.’”

As I became a climber and got to know other climbers, however, I realized most of them were rebels against the mainstream culture, and flying a flag that said “Viva Los Fun Hogs” on the summit in place of the American flag was a perfect expression of both the rebellion and the commitment to a sport that at its core had no tangible economic value. The great French alpinist Lionel Terray had succinctly captured that idea when he titled his autobiography Conquistadors of the Useless.

The expedition was sponsored by Rolex, and the company had given each of us an Oyster Perpetual wristwatch with our name engraved on the back. Neither Yvon nor Doug wore a watch, and as soon as they got their Rolexes they donated them to an auction to raise funds for an environmental group. “You don’t need a watch to know what time it is,” Doug told me. “There’s clocks everywhere. Watches are just about status and money. That’s why I don’t hire people who wear watches.” “Anything else you look for? When you’re hiring?” “How they walk. If they come down heel first they’re usually clumsy and don’t have a lot of energy. People who walk on the balls of their feet, they tend to have more energy.”

“It’s pretty cool that as we near the end of the twentieth century,” I had said when Phil had originally proposed he do a reconnaissance, “there are still places you can get lost because there aren’t any maps.”

“John? He’s a really good guy. We were in a tent together on K2 for a long time. He’s really dependable, and he’s got a good sense of humor, which helps when you’re stuck in a tent.” “No, no, he’s a good guy, I know. It’s just that he’s a little, you know, like this,” Doug said, flattening his hand and using it to scribe an imaginary vertical line. “Kind of on a straight path, maybe not too flexible.” “How can you tell?” “Listen to the way he conjugates verbs.” “Verbs?” “Yeah, he uses mostly preterit and command tenses. Hardly any subjunctive or conditional conjugations.”

“He told me once, ‘It’s not how much you sell something for, but how much you pay for it.’ So you see, he taught me about margins. At the same time, he was scrupulously fair. One time I tailed along to a church in the middle of nowhere that was selling some furniture. My dad immediately spotted this rectory table that he wanted. He asked the priest how much they were asking, and the guy said two thousand dollars. My father then told the priest he wanted to buy it, but for four thousand. When we were back in the car, I asked him why he did that. He explained that he would sell the table for eight thousand. Then he looked at me and said, ‘It only works when it’s fair to both sides.’”

One of my teammates took the time to sight the compass directions of the peaks and to get altitude readings from all the high points. He drafted maps of our cirque, scribing the ridgelines, noting the summits, and using his altimeter to calculate rough elevations. “Maybe you should draw dragons in the margins,” I said. “Dragons?” “You know, in the Middle Ages, when cartographers got to the edge of the map where the rest of the world was unknown, they used to write, ‘Here Be Dragons.’” “Kind of appropriate, since we’re in the Land of the Thunder Dragon,” Yvon added, referring to the traditional name for Bhutan. Back in camp, the yaks and yak herders had arrived. The expedition was over, and despite not being able to find our mountain, things had worked out. As we packed our gear, Yvon said there was one thing that was bothering him. “The maps,” he said. “The maps?” “I don’t think we should publish them.” “Why not?” “The same reason I stopped reporting the new climbs I do in the Tetons. So the next guys who come along have to figure it out. So they’ll have the same sense of discovery.” “That makes sense. But what should we do with the maps?” “Burn ’em.” “Burn ’em?” “Yeah, torch the mothers. It’ll be the perfect ending to our trip.” Yvon Chouinard, the iconoclast. It took a moment for all of us to think it through, but soon we were into the idea. My teammate pulled out the maps he had so carefully drawn, and with his BIC lighter set them on fire. We stood around, cheering him...

When you pursue adventure sports for decades, you learn to use your mind to make your body do what you want it to do, even as over those decades your body starts to talk back more loudly. Maybe we needed a good Do Boy trip especially because we were approaching that stage of our lives where we needed confirmation that our minds still had veto power over our bodies.

Between meals we lay under our makeshift tarp, trading books. Doug’s titles were all about conservation and the environment—he had become a student of Deep Ecology, a way of looking at humans as only a thread in the fabric of nature, a species with no moral right to dominate other species. Of all the Do Boys, Doug was taking the deepest dive into what he now referred to as the environmental crisis, and that was the most frequent topic in our daily conversations around our small fire of smoldering wood.

“Every start upon an untrodden path,” he wrote, “is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful.”

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw wrote. “The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

want to see it all,’ he said. To do that, he made the commitment, just as he turned fifty, to leave the road he had been on all his adult life and take an entirely new one. No maps, no signposts, absolutely no guarantee he would reach the destination. How many among us has the courage to do that?”

In a back issue of National Geographic I once found a photograph of a set of fossilized footprints that were discovered on the Laetoli Plains of Tanzania, to the south of the celebrated Olduvai Gorge. They were the prints of upright primates, two adults and one child, walking side by side, made 3.6 million years ago, near the dawn of our emergence as a species. Now, as I walked through the thornbush, I again thought of those footprints in stone. I watched my feet leave prints in the red earth, and I felt a palpable connection. My mind flipped through the generations like calendar pages in a period movie—20,000, 50,000, 100,000 generations—and there was my ancestral family walking across this same thornbush land, with the same savanna trees and only slight variations of the same animals, leaving their prints in the soft mud as they strode bipedally forward in their eternal gait.

I came to the conclusion that our basal response, whenever we have the opportunity combined with the technology, is to hunt our brethren wild creatures into oblivion. It is sometimes said that, like other wild creatures, we, too, have three imperatives: to eat, to not be eaten, and to procreate. I would add a fourth: our imperative to have purpose—our need for art, for beauty, for understanding how we fit into the universe, and, closer to home, how we fit into the web of life that surrounds and includes us. Therein lies the hope: that we might allow the fourth imperative to counter the instincts we have carried with us out of the plains of Africa.

reminded myself that tenacity is easier when you don’t have a choice.

I watched him load his pack and disappear down the gorge and I asked myself, Where did he get that ability to push himself when the rest of us have thrown in the towel? What is his secret? But I knew there was no secret. There was only passion and willpower. * * *

Today, when I see pronghorn run, my mind goes to American cheetahs and the other animals that went extinct in the overkill, and from there to my conclusion that, whenever we have the opportunity combined with the technology—unless we evoke what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature—we’ll hunt them and steal their habitats until all that is left are skeletons in a museum.

The construction of the wildlife bridge over the Jackson-Pinedale highway was a collaborative effort, with many people coming together to safeguard the path of the pronghorn. But a big part of that effort came from Joe Riis, when he decided to buy film instead of food, and when he ended each day sleeping in the back of his truck on a foam pad atop his life-sized cutout of a pronghorn, and when he fell asleep thinking about how to reposition his camera traps to capture the first close-up photographs of his totem animal. The word obsession gets a bad rap from its association with mental health, but when you look over the history of human achievement you realize much of it happened because one person had an obsessive laser focus on one goal.

Kris and Doug had had their eyes on the area for years, but the idea for the future park got a jumpstart in 2000 when my family and I, in a vehicle we borrowed from Kris and Doug, scouted the Chilean side of the potential project while Kris and Doug, in their other vehicle, investigated the Argentinian side. The genesis for the trip was Jennifer’s and my interest in exposing our three kids more directly to what Aunt Kris and Uncle Doug were trying to do. As I developed the itinerary for the road trip, however, I realized we needed more time than the two-week break the kids had over Christmas. Some of their teachers had pushed back, and I had called Doug to tell him I wasn’t sure we would be able to do the trip. I anticipated this would rile him, knowing his opinion of school since he himself had dropped out of the tenth grade and had never gone back. I was not disappointed. “You go tell those teachers,” Doug had replied, “not to let school get in the way of your kids’ education.” We started the journey by spending three days with Kris and Doug in Pumalín, where Doug took the kids on a hike that included a stop at one of the biggest alerces in the park, a tree more than 2,000 years old.

“Remember that note card above Doug’s desk at Esprit?” I replied. “Commit, and then figure it out.”

In 2006 I had another chance to visit what then was still the future Patagonia National Park. I was working at Patagonia-thecompany, and one of its surf ambassadors, Chris Malloy, proposed making a film inspired by the Fun Hog road trip that Yvon and Doug had made in 1968 from Southern California to Southern Argentina to climb Fitz Roy. Doug had convinced the others that they should make a movie “to pay for the trip.” They bought a secondhand 16mm Bolex camera and anointed one of the team, who was a photographer, to be cinematographer. The resulting film, Mountain of Storms, remained unknown to all but a few climbing aficionados until nearly four decades later, when Chris got hold of a VHS cassette inside a beat-up sleeve labeled “Fitz Roy.” Inspired by the movie, Chris’s idea was to have a group of young climbers and surfers repeat the trip, “not just climbing and surfing,” he added, “but searching for the souls of the sports, in the wildest places on the planet.”

As Yvon liked to say, it isn’t an adventure until something goes wrong. The boat made it to Chile, and our crew continued to Pumalín, where they met up with Yvon and Doug. By then Doug’s petition to the Chilean government to designate Pumalín an official nature sanctuary had been approved, and we filmed Doug showing our younger surfers and climbers around the future park, and then later, with Yvon, we filmed the two old guys sharing their views on the importance of wildland conservation with the young guys. “Most people see nature as nothing more than a basket of resources,” Doug said. “A cornucopia to benefit the human economy.” “They think we can live without nature,” Yvon added. “Or they think they’re better than nature because they can manipulate nature. They don’t think we need free-flowing rivers because if the salmon are blocked, no problem, they can just farm the salmon.” “They delude themselves into thinking they can live in a glass box above nature,” Doug added. “They don’t see that civilizations are as fragile as life itself. Bang, one day you’re dead. The Ottomans, the Romans, the Greeks, the Mayans. None of the globalists want to look at that possibility.” “Accepting that you’re going to die,” Yvon said, “that we’re all going to die—that all societies have a beginning and an end—doesn’t mean you have to give up on living, or that you have to become part of accelerating the end. Doug and I agree on that, but in other ways we’re opposites. He is more bothered ab...

“How does it look?” she asked. “It’s taken me a minute to figure it out,” I answered. “But it’s not how it looks. It’s how it feels. And it feels wild.”

“We’ll have a section here on the beauty of nature,” he continued, leading us through more rooms. “You would hope people see and appreciate beauty, but we want to make sure they understand why it’s so important: because beauty is what leads to love of nature, and, as Kris says, you don’t save what you don’t love.”

I stopped to cough out water. The life jacket didn’t seem to be working. I was starting to drown. The point was there, still the same distance. How much longer did I have? Ten minutes? I rested my head against the life jacket and looked across the lake to the peaks, white snow against cerulean sky. So, this was the day. December 8, 2015. The day on the calendar, the day that had always been on the calendar. Always unmarked, until now. I looked around. The peaks were so beautiful. And this time, unlike the avalanche, when everything was whirring by, this time I could pause and enjoy the beauty. This time, it was peaceful. I turned over, face in the water, eyes open. The gemstone blue. Fathomless. The blue world. The blue beauty of the blue world.

Integrity is wholeness, The greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, The divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man Apart from that.

Under his name, carved into the stone, were the words, “Birdie and Lolo.” I imagined future visitors would wonder what the names meant, but I knew they were Doug and Kris’s nicknames for each other, their terms of endearment. How proud my friend would be to witness what his wife Birdie had achieved. I took the handful of califate berries I had carried down the hill and sprinkled them over his grave. “He who eats the califate,” I said, repeating a local saying, “returns to Patagonia.” I left the grave and walked back toward the gate of the small fence framing the cemetery. There, carved into a wood panel on the back of the arch over the gate, was the last of the many signs Doug left us. It was another of his favorite sayings, this one from John Muir. No hay sinónimo para Dios más perfecto que la Belleza. There is no synonym for God more perfect than Beauty.

I never imagined that Jennifer would die before me. Jennifer, however, never felt that way. It wasn’t that she had a conviction she would die first, but rather a deep understanding that none of us knows when our life, or the lives of those around us who we most love, will end, and that the ending can take us by surprise. We all know this, of course, but how many of us have the wisdom to go about our daily rounds integrating this awareness into all our actions, into all our decisions, whether those decisions are matters of consequence or matters of inconsequence, to find pleasure in the commonplace, to integrate into our lives what it really means to, with profound awareness, live fully in the moment?

I took off my glasses, looked at our hundreds of friends, and asked them to hold the hands of those next to them. A choir then sang “Going Home.” Morning star lights the way, Restless dream all done. Shadows gone, break of day, Real life has begun. There’s no break, there’s no end, Just a-living on. Wide awake, with a smile, Going on and on . . . * * * For thirty of our forty years of marriage, Jennifer and I lived in the same house in Ojai, a historic Spanish Revival designed by Paul Williams, the first successful Black architect in America; we could feel his noted advocacy of self-reliance imbued in the walls. Jennifer had painted those walls with the colors of the palette of Provence favored by the Impressionists. Doug Tompkins, noted for his design aesthetic, told many of his friends it was his favorite house in the world. For my part, I told Jennifer, “Su casa es su casa.” A friend built a small box for Jennifer’s ashes out of wood from a live oak dead-felled on a neighbor’s property; the corners were perfectly mortised and tenoned. At my request he inlaid an old worn tile that Jennifer had bought in Mexico depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe on the front of the box. Mexico was Jennifer’s favorite country, and Mexicans her favorite people, and while she was not religious she did believe in spirits. And she believed that some of those spirits were guardians, and that Guadalupe was her guardian. I don’t feel Guadalupe abandoned her, but I do feel it is possible—in the way t...