[1.2] 12 About 12: Yvon Chouinard
Making his own pitons, going on a 5000-mile road trip, and giving Patagonia to the planet
Hi!
This β12 about 12β series is simply 12 facts about 12 people who have managed to make a life of travel. Each story is broken down into four parts:
Origin: how did they start traveling?
Grind: what did they sacrifice?
Breakthrough: when did they go big?
Scale: what are they making of it now?
At the end of each email, I compress my takeaways from the traveler into just one thing to remember.
Have an amazing week!
~ Atom
#2
Introducing Patagonia founder and legendary rock climber, Yvon Chouinard. πΊπΈπΊπΈπΊπΈ
With his outsized reputation as a businessman and philanthropist, Yvon might not be the first person you think of when I say βtraveler.β
Origins
At 14, Yvon joined the Southern California Falconry Club where he became obsessed with climbing.
By the summer he turned sixteen, he was already doing solo ascents of unclimbed routes of Gannett Peak, the tallest mountain in Wyoming.
Grind
But coming from a family of limited means, Yvon couldnβt afford the expensive and unremovable pitons from Europe that dominated the market. So he did the obvious: he taught himself to blacksmith and made his own.
An hourβs worth of work would give him two pitons that he would sell for only $1.50 each. This was hardly a source of fortune, but because most of his tools were portable, it offered Yvon freedom: he could load up his car and travel the California coast from Big Sur to San Diego.
He borrowed $825 from his parents and emerged in 1965 with his first mail-order catalog and a partnership with Tom Frost. Under the name of Chouinard Equipment, the pair redesigned every climbing tool they got their hands on.
As sales grew, so did the scale of his trips. In 1968, Yvon joined five friends on a 5,000-mile road trip from Ventura, California to Cerro Fitz Roy in South America. The adventure was fully documented in the film Mountain of Storms.
Breakthrough
In 1971, during a climbing trip in England with his wife Malinda Pennoyer, Yvon came across a mill that made vintage corduroy, which he fashioned into heavy-duty shorts and knickers. This was the first of many soft goods designed out of the practicalities of Yvonβs adventures.
In 1973, Patagonia was founded to house these soft goods whose sales were outpacing those of the hard. Paired with the founding of Patagonia was a challenge: βAs we enter this new era of mountaineering, reexamine your motives for climbing. Employ restraint and good judgment. Remember the rock, the other climbers β climb clean.β
Out of this challenge, Yvon and Patagonia made their first major business decision on behalf of the environment. They stopped the production of their most important and lucrative product, the pitons, and in its place introduced aluminum chocks proven not to harm the rock.
Scale
A global recession hit in 1990 and Patagonia was forced to lay off 20% of its workforce. βIt was the worst thing Iβve ever had to go through,β Yvon recalled. Yet, this was a watershed moment because it solidified Yvonβs commitment to the environment.
In 2002, Yvon and Patagonia promised 1 Percent for the Planet. In 2012, they became a certified B Corp. In 2018, they rewrote their purpose to βWeβre in business to save our home planet.β
And most recently, in September 2022, the legendary climber announced that βEarth is now our only shareholder.β Under theΒ Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective fund,Β every dollar not reinvested back into Patagonia will be distributed as dividends to protect Planet Earth.
THE ONE THING
Whatβs important isnβt what you accomplished, itβs how you got there.
When he was a kid, Yvon dreamed of becoming a fur trapper like his French-Canadian ancestors. So, you can imagine that when this young boy fell in love with climbing and decided to make his pitons it was for no other reason than he could.
There was no dream of becoming a business mogul or of revolutionizing corporate America.
For Yvon Chouinard, itβs always just been about his search for the Perfect Moment: the flash of βlucidity, focus, and emptiness,β the psychic intensity that hardship brings.
His longtime fishing companion Tom McGuane explains it like this: βWhenever he gets comfortable, he gets suspicious of everything, and he sort of smells a rat. We have a camp on the Dean River [in British Columbia] where we have warm beds and where somebody cooks for us, and I know that bothers him.β McGuane adds: βHe always wants to do things the hard way.β
π§π» This piece was modeled after a Medium article I wrote back in July. I was inspired by podcast episodes from Armchair Explorer and How I Built This then supported by articles and interviews from Surfer Today, The New Yorker, Menβs Journal, Topia, Patagonia, and Case Western University School of Law.