Doug Tompkins was 47 and at the top of his game when he decided he had climbed the wrong mountain.
About Doug Tompkins: Impatient to be out living his life, he dropped out of high school (actually expelled) and began exploring, ski-racing, and rock climbing. At 21, he wound up in San Francisco where he and his new wife borrowed $5,000 from a bank and started a company making rock climbing and camping equipment. They called it The North Face because traditionally the coldest, most unforgiving, and most challenging route to climb a mountain (in the Northern Hemisphere) was its north face and the new company was dedicated to the mission of outfitting extreme mountaineers and explorers against the harshest of elements.
From his close friend and climbing buddy, Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, Doug adopted Chouinard’s MBA philosophy (Management by Absence) and continued to take long excursions throughout his leadership of The North Face and later Esprit. The first of his epic trips came days after the birth of his first daughter. It began with the idea of making an adventure movie and turned into a 5,000 mile surfing-skiing-climbing road trip with Yvon, and three other friends determined to climb Mount Fitz Roy in Patagonia.
Aside: Mount Fitz Roy was named for Robert FitzRoy who, as captain of the second voyage of the HMS Beagle, had travelled up the Santa Cruz River in 1834 and charted large parts of the Patagonian coast with Charles Darwin.
While the movie is not up to today’s high-tech standards, it is gripping and the only word that came to mind after watching them fight the weather and spend 31 days holed up in a snow cave, was a very long “why?” (I also agree completely with one of the YouTube commenters, “the unsung hero here is the camera man.”)
The high point for me was when Yvon Chouinard, one of my all-time heroes, especially when he went on to donate his company to help the world avoid climate disaster, showed that he could apparently bake bread out of almost nothing in the middle of nowhere.
Doug returned from that trip and went on to lead Esprit, a fashion industry phenomenon, for over two decades until he realized it wasn’t what he wanted to do. Almost instantly, he sold his share of the company to his now ex-wife for $150 million and followed the call to protect Patagonia, the land he had come to love.
Kris Tompkins was 43 and CEO of Patagonia when her mountain appeared, grinning and inviting her to drop everything. She had shepherded the company from its roots as a small business making climbing pitons into a major corporate leader in the outdoor clothing market with a mission for climate sustainability.
Doug met Kris and the ground shifted. Their visions joined like separate rivers into one powerful force for protecting wild beauty. It melded them into a fierce partnership of action based on their shared philosophy: Commit then figure it out.
Lito Tejada-Flores, the camera man of that early movie, described Doug: “He was fearless. He never turned his back on a difficult problem, a difficult conclusion, or an overwhelming challenge: he was the quintessential man of action, a force of nature for nature.”
Together for two decades, they fought all the obstacles of politics, earthquakes, and suspicion as they inched forward toward the dream of creating national parks that would guarantee the protection of the lands into the future. They bought large parcels of land and building infrastructure needed to protect it; spending their own funds and soliciting more from friends around the world. They met and listened to people in the communities surrounding the lands, creating jobs, turning former poachers into wildlife protectors and kept pushing the idea of national parks.
Even Doug’s death in a kayaking accident at age 72, did not stop the dream. Kris carried on and recently accomplished the vision of adding over 14.8 million acres to the national park systems of Chile and Argentina, thus also protecting 30 million acres of shoreline.
Kris didn’t stop there. She has now built an international organization, Tompkins Conservation, advocating rewilding for the total Earth, one continent at a time. Her definition of rewilding means creating “fully functional ecosystems.” As she says in this video: “We’re going for the whole horse.” Meaning the entire planet.
While it may not be a Tompkins-level mountain, my wild idea is to help people understand and fall in love with the beauty of the world around us.
P.S. This story will be featured in the quarterly WildBeauty: what if …? with other inspiring stories of rewilding and conservation. Publication date: 9/21/2026. Paid subscriptions include free digital and print copies of each quarterly publication.
Also print copies will be available to everyone through Buy Me a Coffee and will be announced when they are available.
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