How a Dirtbag Became a Billionaire—Without Compromising His Ethics

“I’d feel a lot more comfortable on top of a mountain than here right now,” Yvon Chouinard once told President Bill Clinton while participating in a conference on corporate responsibility.

That’s because Chouinard is a reluctant corporate leader. His biggest accident was no blunder in the mountains, but becoming a billionaire. And his greatest legacy is not one of his first ascents or gear innovations, but giving his billions away to help save the planet he loves exploring. In short, this is the narrative arc of the life of Chouinard, a humble descendant of French-Canadian fur trappers. It’s also the story told in the new biography Dirtbag Billionaire by New York Times correspondent David Gelles.

Chouinard may not have intended to become the founder of two companies. But, as an avid adventurer, he couldn’t help but try to improve upon the mediocre outdoor gear available at the time. His innovations in layers and synthetic apparel officially became Patagonia in 1973. Sixteen years later, he sold the hard goods arm of his operation that made nuts, ice axes, and more equipment to employee Peter Metcalf, who incorporated his new business as Black Diamond. Today, both companies are among the most recognizable brands in the outdoors.

But in 2022, Chouinard did something arguably even more memorable (in the long run). He established the Patagonia Purpose Trust, ensuring that all profits not reinvested into the company would forever go toward the company’s mission of “saving our home planet.” Patagonia has long donated one percent of its profits to fight climate change and support other environmental causes. But this restructuring significantly increased annual giving to an estimated $100 million. Chouinard also transferred all of his family shares to the trust.

While Dirtbag Billionaire is worth a read for its concrete ideas on how capitalism can do better, for climbers, it holds no shortage of colorful outtakes from Chouinard’s early days as a gritty Yosemite Stonemaster.

To record these stories—and render a portrait of the world’s wealthiest dirtbag—Gelles retraced Chouinard’s many journeys across his 86 years. This included fishing trips in Argentina, and a 1968 expedition to the spires of Cerro Chaltén that inspired the Patagonia logo.

The vignettes in Dirtbag Billionaire unequivocally show that Chouinard was once the dirtbag to end all dirtbags—and remains so at heart. Yet at the same time, he was steadily building a brilliant career, even as he subsided off wild squirrels or celebrated his 30th birthday stranded in an ice cave. Check out some of our favorite tales from Chouinard’s dirtbag days below.

10 vignettes from Yvon Chouinard’s life as a climber

Will climb for birds of prey

The unlikely reason Chouinard first got into climbing? Falcons. Before he sent El Cap, surfed Pacific waves, or fished the rivers of Wyoming, his first passion was falconry, the ancient tradition of training and flying falcons. It all started when he was around 15 years old and attended his first meeting of the Southern California Falconry Club.

In his ensuing pursuit of nests near Los Angeles where he could find falcons, Chouinard “learned to scamper down sheer walls … keeping his toes perched on inch-wide ledges,” as Gelles writes. As Chouinard sought out steeper walls, he started using ropes. He even served as a volunteer in the effort to save the endangered peregrine falcon. This involved breeding the birds in captivity and placing their eggs in wild nests.

Novice climbers, circa mid-1950s

After a member of the falconry club began teaching Chouinard about climbing, he tried rappelling for the first time. Due to a lack of gear like ATCs, harnesses, or even Swami belts (primitive and early iterations of harnesses fashioned from webbing), his rap setup was beyond sketchy. Gelles describes Chouinard’s rappel system as follows: “wrapping the rope around his waist and over his shoulder.” He loved the “feeling of dangling from a rope, bouncing off the face of a cliff, feeling like a Slinky flipping down a set of stairs.”

Shortly thereafter, Chouinard took his first-ever climbing trip to Wyoming’s Wind River Range. Still very much a novice, he decided to attempt a summit of Gannett Peak, Wyoming’s highest mountain. He reached the summit despite his decidedly non-technical Sears Roebuck work boots and outran a storm on the descent. From there, he headed to the Tetons. Luckily, old pros like Royal Robbins and Tom Frost took him on as a mentee.

Trappings of a dirtbag

Forget the sleep setup in the trunk of your Honda Civic or cans of beans for dinner. Without a real tent, Chouinard improvised his sleep setup with “an old shower curtain,” writes Gelles. Homeless in the Tetons, he seasonally took up residence “in an abandoned incinerator on the banks of Jenny Lake.” His diet often consisted of “porcupines, grouse, and squirrels,” plus any fish he could catch. And as the story goes, he also ate cat food straight from the can. Along with dirtbag buddy Ken Weeks, Chouinard purchased a case of dented cat food at the price of five cents a can. They ate the cat food “over the course of a summer,” according to Gelles. “I was a dirtbag climber,” Chouinard told Gelles, “I had no money whatsoever.”

Chouinard also enjoyed van life far before it was cool. In 1968, he and his adventure buddy Doug Tompkins outfitted a 1965 Ford Econoline van with a sleeping platform and shelves to stash all their climb, ski, surf, and fishing gear. Declaring themselves the “Fun Hogs” (their goal was to “hog fun”), they booked it south from California to Patagonia. It took them four months to reach their destination, but they weren’t in a hurry.

Scares

Like many bold climbers of his era, Chouinard was no stranger to scares. Chalk it up to a combination of pushing the sport’s limits and inadequate gear. In the Tetons, for example, Chouinard tried for a first ascent of the Crooked Thumb. Run-out and tired, Chouinard reached for a hold that broke. He fell 160 feet before the rope caught his fall, leaving him with a bone-deep cut to his leg.

On that fateful Patagonia road trip in 1968, Chouinard, Tompkins, Chris Jones, and Dick Dorworth spent 31 days stuck in an ice cave on Cerro Chaltén (you can read a firsthand account of that frigid month from Dorworth here). Chouinard slashed his knee open while chopping ice and celebrated his 30th birthday nursing it in the cave. To pass the time, he read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. After a month of suffering, they finally got a weather window and summited Cerro Chaltén on December 20, 1968, making the third successful ascent.

Over a decade later, in 1980, Chouinard participated in an expedition to summit Minya Konka (24,800 feet) in the Himalaya. While glissading down from Camp II, an avalanche struck, sending Chouinard, Rick Ridgeway, Jonathan Wright, and Kim Schmitz on a quarter-mile ride over a 30-foot cliff. Schmitz got tangled in the rope and broke his back, while Wright broke his neck and died moments later. The incident complicated Chouinard’s perspective on alpine objectives “for years,” according to Gelles. “Fuck these mountains,” he said to Ridgeway on the hike out.

First ascents in South Korea

Chouinard reportedly drank an entire bottle of soy sauce in an effort to spike his blood pressure and evade a draft for the Korean War. It didn’t work, so he begrudgingly deployed to Seoul in 1962. According to Chouinard himself, he was such a pain in the ass in the service that his sole job became to power off and on a generator. By day, Gelle writes that he “wandered off base and found granite walls to climb around Seoul,” where he made a number of first ascents.

DIY before YouTube

Chouinard embarked on his gear career, with no engineering degree, no apprenticeships, and zero formal education in product design. Instead, he checked out a book on blacksmithing from his local library and got to work on his first project: improving the piton.

Over time, he became proficient enough in forging steel to produce two pitons per hour. He sold his pitons for $1.50 a pop, considerably more than the going price in Europe of 15 to 30 cents per piton. But the Europeans were forging their pitons from iron, which was softer and therefore less durable than Chouinard’s steel variety. With the harder metal, Chouinard’s pitons could be removed from a placement in rock “without getting deformed,” writes Gelles. Chouinard argued that their reusability made them worth the higher rate.

Misadventures in fixed gear

When Chouinard went climbing and his handmade pitons wouldn’t fit in the cracks, he came home and tinkered with them. This didn’t always work out. For example, to attempt a finger crack on Yosemite’s Kat Pinnacle, he broke the end off a power hacksaw blade and threaded a sling through the blade’s hole. On a 1960 attempt on Kat Pinnacle with Tom Frost—who later became his business partener—they tried hammering this improvised gear into a crack, but “it shattered into pieces,” according to Gelles. After bailing, Chouinard set about inventing the razor-thin, steel-fashioned RURP: the Realized Ultimate Reality Piton.

In the mid ‘60s, The North Face was one of the first brick-and-mortar spots where Chouinard’s pitons, carabiners, and other gear could be purchased. Founded by Chouinard’s adventure buddy Doug Tompkins, The North Face was an eclectic retailer of “outdoor gear and knickknacks,” as Gelles describes it.

Right brain tinkerer

Despite the technical nature of his products, Chouinard is more of an artist than an engineer, according to his contemporary, Royal Robbins. To this end, Gelles includes a beautiful quote from Robbins about Chouinard: “A poetic soul, Chouinard really rather disdains the analytical mind, for he hates to see beautiful things ripped and torn. He has the kind of mind which would make a good artist but a poor chess player. Maddeningly creative, Chouinard has invented more techniques and devices in climbing than anyone I know.”

Together, Robbins and Chouinard, along with Tom Frost and Chuck Pratt, made the first ascent of the North America Wall in 1964, topping out on the day before Halloween.

Crusty at heart

For all his generosity and vision, Chouinard is not always portrayed by Gelles as a warm or welcoming soul when it comes to other humans. He notes that some climbers characterize Chouinard as “elitist.” With his dedication to the preservation of Yosemite and other wild landscapes, “he at one point proposed limiting climbing in the Valley to only the best, creating an invitation-only Yosemite Climbing Club,” says Gelles. Though he’d been mentored himself, he “had little patience for neophytes or weak athletes, and at times equated physical fitness with moral superiority.”

Whether you think that’s completely cringe or just Stonemaster-style crustiness typical of the era, Dirtbag Billionaire doesn’t shy away from Chouinard’s flaws. Gelles avoids lionizing Patagonia’s leader, describing Chouinard’s mercurial leadership style that often bewildered his staff at Patagonia.

The invention of “clean climbing”

In keeping with his environmental ethos, Chouinard set his sights on optimizing an even more reusable piece of gear than the piton: the chock, now known as the nut. To precipitate the shift from pitons to chocks, Chouinard coined the phrase “clean climbing.” In a catalog peddling his chocks, Chouinard published an essay by California mountaineer Doug Robinson. “Climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing. Clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber,” Robinson wrote.

In the intro to that catalogue, Chouinard and Frost promoted the paramount importance of style. “It is the style of the climb, not the attainment of the summit, which is the measure of personal success,” they wrote.

Dirtbag Billionaire was published on September 2 by Simon & Schuster. It’s available wherever books are sold. 

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