Rick Ridgeway - Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

Life Lived Wild

Adventures at the Edge of the Map

Day two of our foot traverse across the uninhabited and unexplored northwest corner of the Chang Tang Plateau, Tibet. I am surveying that days route during our self-supported trek pulling rickshaws, each with 250 pounds of food and supplies. Jimmy Chin

Life Lived Wild

Adventures at the Edge of the Map

RICK RIDGEWAY

Life Lived Wild

Adventures at the Edge of the Map

Patagonia publishes a select list of titles on wilderness, wildlife, and outdoor sports that inspire and restore a connection to the natural world.

2021 Rick Ridgeway

Photograph copyrights held by the photographer as indicated in captions.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher and copyright holders. Requests should be emailed to or mailed to Patagonia Books, Patagonia Inc., 259 W. Santa Clara St., Ventura, CA 93001-2717.

Hardcover Edition
Printed in Canada on Roland Enviro 100 Satin FSC certified 100% post-consumer-waste paper.

Editor John Dutton

Photo Editors Cameron Tambakis, Jane Sievert

Book Designer Annette Scheid

Project Manager Sonia Moore

Photo Archivist Taylor Norton

Production Rafael Dunn, Tausha Greenblott, and Michaela Purcilly

Creative Director Christina Speed

Publisher Karla Olson

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-938340-99-4

E-Book ISBN 978-1-952338-00-7

Library of Congress Control Number 2021942105

Published by Patagonia Works

Excerpts from the poems of Robert Service by permission of his granddaughter Anne Longepe.

Excerpts from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt.

Copyright 2001 by Jeffers Literary Properties. All rights reserved.

Used by permission of Stanford University Press. www.sup.org

Words and music for Hey Jude by John Lennon and Paul McCartney 1968 Sony Music Publishing LLC, Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Sony Music LLC, 424 Church St., Suite 1200, Nashville TN 37219. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

Maps and end sheets: Christina Speed

Photo of Jennifer Ridgeway. Terri Laine

For Bella

Who heard these stories many times,
even if she was never able to read them.

Day twenty-five of our foot traverse across the Chang Tang Plateau, northwest Tibet, when for each of those days calories out had exceeded calories in. Thats me on the left and Conrad Anker, widely known as one of the worlds strongest climbers, flat on his back. Jimmy Chin

Contents

Doug Tompkins, me, and Yvon Chouinard (l to r) on the summit of a previously unclimbed and unnamed peak in what in 2008 was still the future Patagonia National Park, in southern Chile. At first, we christened the peak Cerro Geezer, but Doug later had the Chilean government name it Cerro Kristina to honor Kris Tompkins, the force behind the final creation of the park. Jimmy Chin

Prologue

I once calculated that I have spent over five years total time sleeping in tents, and most of that in small tents pitched in the worlds most remote regions. I say that not to boast but to offer it as a measure of time spent deeply connected to wildness, because that connection has shaped the way I have lived my life, teaching me to distinguish what I call matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence.

I am seventy-two years old now, and I had my first significant adventure at age eighteen when I joined five friends and we sailed a small boat to Tahiti. My passion for adventure included both the ocean and the mountains, and later jungles, plateaus, and ice caps. I was obsessed with the way outdoor sports required both physical and mental skills, and how the sports were played not only in the arena of wild nature, but in those places on the planet so remote a few of them remained unexplored.

In my early twenties my companions were my accomplices, and we learned together from our experiences. In my late twenties I met Yvon Chouinard, who later introduced me to Doug Tompkins. They were both older than me, and now my companions also became my role models. Yvon and Doug had been climbing, skiing, and kayaking together since the early 1960s. In addition to outdoor sports, they had both started outdoor companies. Doug founded The North Face and sold that to cofound Esprit with his wife, Susie. In the early 1970s, Yvon started his own apparel business, which he named Patagonia, after the place where he and Doug had made a climb that, because of bad weather combined with steep rock and ice, had taken two months. Years later, looking back, Yvon would say that for both of them, the experience was a significant inspiration for what they did later in their lives.

Going out into the wilds of the world at an early age, Doug added, where nature was basically untouched, we got into our souls a sense of beauty.

Humans all strive to protect what we love, and protecting the beauty of wild nature from our species aptitude to disfigure it would become a central focus for Doug and Yvon. I thought I was already doing an OK job taking the lessons I was learning in wild nature and applying them to my domestic life. As with any new friends, however, if you keep your antennae tuned you can usually pick up new ideas that give you new ways to go about your own life. One of the most important for me was a note card tacked to the wall behind Dougs desk at Esprit that said, Commit and Then Figure It Out.

Doug was the one who came up with the Do Boys. He said he ran into the phrase in Japan, where Esprit had a design studio. It was the title of one of those comic books popular in that country, about a group of guys who go around having adventures, and as more friends joined us on more adventures, it seemed like a good name for our posse.

We dont just talk about doing stuff, Yvon said. We do it.

To a remarkable degree, the Do Boys were successful not only in outdoor sports but also in business. The professional side of our lives, however, was never the central defining attribute of who we were, and Doug and Yvon in particular disparaged the label businessman. Many years after I had become a Do Boyafter I had successfully sold my company that licensed visual assets to advertising agencies and joined PatagoniaI was at a business conference where I stepped into an elevator with another attendee, a pleasant-looking man in a nicely tailored suit.

You work for Patagonia, he said, reading my nametag. His badge identified him as the Global VP of Sustainability at Coca-Cola. Ive met your colleague, Yvon Chouinard. We were on a panel together.