His wild life
The `real Indiana Jones' wrote a book about it
Shaking hands with legendary adventurer Rick Ridgeway outside his serene Ojai home, I felt like I was meeting Indiana Jones — a comparison made by Rolling Stone — after he'd hung up the hat and whip.
Nothing about Ridgeway, in his comfy Ugg slippers, belied the extreme life he'd lived, from being part of the first American team to summit the towering peak of K2 to nearly dying from typhoid while trekking through the jungles of Borneo to experiencing the horrors of a Panamanian prison after a cockamamie get-rich scheme went south.
Ridgeway, 74, a former executive at Patagonia, seems to have carved out a relatively quiet life focused on conservation in the picturesque valley east of Santa Barbara. (Not to say he isn't active; he trekked 100 miles across East Africa on foot last year.) He exuded calm, warmth and generosity. There was a glint of impish wisdom in his eye. He offered my partner and me tea. A Bernedoodle named Benny doted on him and he returned the affection.
Small touches in his tidy dwelling hinted at “A Life Lived Wild,” the title of Ridgeway's most recent book detailing on-the-edge experiences that seem like they belong in a fabled, hardier past. Lithographs of pheasants adorning a wall harked back to his youth when his family raised the birds. A National Geographic issue lay atop a stack of magazines.
Ridgeway, born in Long Beach, moved to rural Orange County between the fifth and
sixth grade. The tiny town of Olive had a blacksmith, a oneroom bank and a pharmacy with an old-school soda fountain. When his parents split up, he followed his father to the Lake Tahoe area, where he climbed his first mountain and started dreaming of bigger ascents.
His father abandoned him when he was about 15, and he eventually moved back to his childhood stomping grounds. But his idyllic Mayberry was now a construction yard surrounded by tract houses.
“I started going up to the hills around Los Angeles, climbing Mt. Baldy … summer and winter,” he told me last month. “As an escape, as a solace, as a place to find that sense of being in nature that I had as a kid that had imprinted on me.”
I often think about what it means to find a slice of wild in our modern world of at-yourfingertips convenience. And I don't think it's a coincidence that outdoor recreation has exploded
as unexplored corners across the globe dwindle and technology increasingly frees us from literal legwork.
“Wild” is a concept that contains multitudes. Some might get a whiff of it backpacking in remote regions, while others tap into it while overlanding, growing their own food or shredding slopes. To get to the heart of what it means to be wild in 2024, I sat down with Ridgeway for a chat. Our conversation below was edited for clarity and brevity.
Q
How do you define “wild”? When you chose the title of your book, “Life Lived Wild,” what did that mean to you?
A
For me, wild refers to the part of nature where our human touch is at minimum. I've been fortunate in my own life to have been in a few places in the world where the imprint of human beings was vestigial at best. And I've been in a handful of places where
there were no signs of our species. And those places are really hard to find. Now, in fact, there may not even be any more of them. Once I was able to get into what's probably the most remote corner of the Amazon Basin, not far from where the borders of Venezuela and Brazil and Colombia come together. I was with a few friends climbing at a very remote rock spire that came out of this remote corner of the jungle that was so remote that there were no human beings living in this whole section … And it felt different. And I realized that that's for me what the definition of wildness was. It also became a baseline that I use for measuring the way I think of wildness.
QAnd the feeling of being close to the wild, like prehuman activity — is that the same feeling of reaching, for example, the summit of a very high mountain? Are those the same?