A ‘complete man’
North Face and Esprit co-founder dies in kayaking accident in Chile
At least he died doing what he loved. That was paramount among a variety of similar sentiments appended to clips and links Wednesday as news circulated that Doug Tompkins, cofounder of North Face and Esprit and the new century’s most ambitious conservationist, succumbed to severe hypothermia on Dec. 8, after a kayak accident on Lago General Carrera, on the Chilean-Argentine border. He was 72.
At the time of the accident, Tompkins was travelling with a group that included a few of his best friends: Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia; Rick Ridgeway, a member of the first American team to summit K2, the world’s second-tallest peak; and Lorenzo Alvarez, owner of the adventure travel outfitter Bio Bio Expeditions. Tompkins and Chouinard first explored the region together 50 years ago. A documentary of their 1968 first ascent of Fitz Roy, Patagonia’s signature mountain, can be seen today as the secret origin myth of the $289 billion (U.S.) outdoor retailing industry.
The “do boys,” as they sometimes called themselves, reunited regularly for fresh adventures. On this one, which Tompkins had mentioned last fall in an interview to Outside magazine, a sudden storm turned their 30-kilometre paddle into a fight for survival.
Wind drove waves twice a kayaker’s height, capsizing their kayaks, and forcing the paddlers to swim in 4 C water. A military patrol boat plucked three of the kayakers out. Despite the high winds, a private helicopter pilot managed to complete a rescue of two more of the boaters and to medevac Tompkins, whose body temperature reportedly dropped to 19 C. He was flown to a hospital in the regional centre of Coyhaique, about1,600 kilometres south of the capital, Santiago. Doctors were unable to revive him.
“Doug was the complete man — original thinker, world-class climber and kayaker, pilot, hugely successful businessman, designer, ecological visionary — and ornery s.o.b.,” his friend Tom Brokaw said. The former NBC News anchor recalled that Tompkins pursued his hobbies and ideas with equal ardour. “We kayaked through the Russian Far East together, and climbed a glacier route on Mt. Rainier — and through it all, he never stopped lecturing me on deep ecology.”
In Chile, as in Argentina, Tompkins inspired suspicion, resentment, and at last, admiration. In 1991, he began buying up large tracts of land in a Chilean rainforest with the fortune he amassed at Esprit, the iconic 1980s womenswear brand he built with his first wife, Susie Tompkins Buell. Done “making clothes and countless things no one needs,” as he later said, he left the company midcareer and used his retail profits to purchase a farm, along with 306,000 hectares, with the stated goal of creating his own nature reserve. He dubbed it Pumalin Park.
Few Chileans believed a word of it. By the end of the ’90s, Chile’s president accused Tompkins and his second wife, Kristine (Kris), who had joined him there in 1994, of evicting tenant ranchers and denying them work.
From there the accusations only got more fanciful. They were stealth Zionists come to form a new state. They were working with the CIA. Their real plan was to steal Chile’s water and ship it to Africa. Any of these struck many Chileans as more probable than someone buying up land to take it out of production, return it to a natural state and give it to the government free.
Today, Pumalin Park is well-visited by Chileans, not merely foreign tourists and journalists fascinated by Tompkins’ expat adventure — although there have been plenty of those, too, including author William Langewiesche, who cast Tompkins as a Fitzcarraldo obsessive in an unflattering profile for the Atlantic.
Official Chile eventually came around, with the military contribut- ing substantial tracts (and even forfeiting its requested artillery range) to endow Corcovado National Park, noted for its lakes and two volcanoes. In 2014, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera designated Yendegaia National Park, in Tierra del Fuego, a joint venture among Chilean conservationists, the government, and a Tompkins foundation. In all, the Tompkins have conserved nearly 890,000 hectares across the Patagonia region and won national park status for three parks that didn’t exist before they got involved.
“National parks are the gold standard for conservation,” Tompkins said. “So our plan is to create the park, get them ready, and then turn them over ready to operate.”
Born in 1943, in Ohio, Douglas Rainsford Tompkins grew up in Millbrook, N.Y., and began climbing in the Shawangunk Mountains in junior high school. He dropped out of prep school and never went to college.
He met his first wife while hitchhiking; even after they started a family and went into business together, they kept travelling, tossing their kids in the back of two-seat prop plane and flying into the back country.
With a $5,000 loan, he and a friend founded North Face in 1966, selling sleeping bags, camping gear and clothes from a shop on the same block in San Francisco as The Condor, a famous topless bar. The Condor and North Face even shared a basement. Tompkins sold his shares well before it became a global brand (some re- ports say for as little as $10,000), but he went on to make his real fortune with Esprit. In the late 1980s, Esprit reached $1 billion in sales, although, contrary to rumour, Tompkins himself was not a billionaire. Tompkins is survived by two daughters, his brother and mother, and his wife, Kris, who travelled to the hospital in Coyhaique. When he and Chouinard and the merry band of climbers set off for Patagonia in 1968, they wanted to make a movie that would do for climbing what Endless Summer had achieved for surfing. The movie wasn’t nearly as inviting as Endless Summer. Still, legend has it that while they waited out bad weather in an ice cave for 15 straight days, the two hatched plans for their respective companies. They completed their first ascent of Fitz Roy, and it fell to Tompkins to provide an account for the American Alpine Journal. In it, he recalled the elation of coming down out of the high-altitude frost and into austral summer below.
“It was Christmas Day and what were we doing? Carrying 100-pound packs!” he wrote.
“We looked back at ‘Old Fitz,’ as we now called it, being on familiar and equal terms. We looked back, not as artists for we weren’t artists, just five tired California Fun Hogs finishing up the trip of trips, licking the dish with a smile from ear to ear, and moustaches full of ice cream saying one to the other — ‘I believe we’ve done it. I believe we’ve done it.’ ”
“Original thinker, world-class climber and kayaker, pilot, hugely successful businessman, designer, ecological visionary — and ornery s.o.b.”
TOM BROKAW FORMER NBC NEWS ANCHOR, ON HIS FRIEND DOUG TOMPKINS