• Complain

Yvon Chouinard - 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless

Here you can read online Yvon Chouinard - 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Patagonia, genre: Non-fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Yvon Chouinard 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless

180° South: Conquerors of the Useless: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "180° South: Conquerors of the Useless" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

180 South takes readers behind the scenes of the film, 180 South, made by Chris Malloy, to learn more about the people who made the original overland journey to Patagonia in 1968, and the repeat journey over ocean and land 40 years later. The book includes stories of events and experiences that inspired Chris Malloy, Yvon Chouinard, and Doug Tompkins to choose paths committed to saving whats left of the wild world. Open it anywhere and enjoy the photographs by the worlds leading surf and climbing photographers Jeff Johnson, Jimmy Chin, Scotty Soen, and Danny Moder.

Yvon Chouinard: author's other books


Who wrote 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

180° South: Conquerors of the Useless — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "180° South: Conquerors of the Useless" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
180 South Conquerors of the Useless - image 1

180 South

Conquerors of the Useless

180 South Conquerors of the Useless - image 2

The Cahuelmo anchored in an estuary Below Cerro Corcovado Patagonia Chile - photo 3

The Cahuelmo anchored in an estuary. Below Cerro Corcovado, Patagonia, Chile. Photo: Scott Soens

One of the biggest social and environmental issues facing Chile is the damming - photo 4

One of the biggest social and environmental issues facing Chile is the damming of rivers. Local residents have started a campaign against the dams called Sin Represas! (Without Dams). Money from Patagonias sale of a poster and T-shirt (art shown here) will be donated to charitable organizations connected to !Sin Represas! Art: Shepard Fairey

FUN HOGS

YVON CHOUINARD

Yvon Chouinard aboard the Cahuelmo Chaitn Chile Photo Jeff Johnson You - photo 5

Yvon Chouinard aboard the Cahuelmo. Chaitn, Chile. Photo: Jeff Johnson

You never know how an adventure will influence the rest of your life. In 1968, when Doug Tompkins proposed that we drive from California to Patagonia in those days a name as remote and alluring as Timbuktu neither of us could know it would be the most important trip either of us would ever take. The goal was to put up a new route on an obscure tusk of granite called Cerro Fitz Roy and have some fun along the way. The experience led to an unlikely fate for a couple of dirtbags: we became philanthropists.

Doug owned a small outdoor store in San Francisco, where he had a few sleeping bags and tents sewn in the back room; I had a blacksmith shop in Ventura where we forged pitons and machined carabiners for a market that needed no research we and our friends were the customers.

It took Doug and me only a couple of weeks to turn our work over to others, talk Dick Dorworth and Lito Tejada-Flores into driving down with us (English climber Chris Jones would hook up with us later), and secure a van a high-mileage 1965 Ford Econoline. I built a sleeping platform in the back, and then we shoehorned in four pairs of skis, eight climbing ropes, racks of carabiners and pitons, camping gear, cold-weather clothing, warm-weather clothing, wetsuits, and fishing rods. We tied two surfboards on the roof. We took along the banner Dougs wife, Susie, made for us to fly from Fitz Roys summit; its big block letters read VIVA LOS FUN HOGS.

We all had complementary talents. Because I had taken auto mechanics in high school, I was appointed team mechanic. Doug and I were the most experienced climbers; Doug and Dick were expert skiers. I was a surfer, and Lito was a climber and photographer to whom we assigned the task of documenting the trip with a wind-up 16mm Bolex we bought secondhand. Lito had never before made a movie or even shot a movie camera. We were living up to Dougs credo, borrowed from Napoleon, Commit first, then figure it out.

Only a week after leaving Ventura, we were surfing the breaks outside Mazatln. South of Mexico City the pavement gave way to a dirt road that, except for a few concrete stretches through capital cities and a gap in Panama, would continue to Patagonia. Once we crossed into Guatemala, however, we confronted a challenge greater than a dirt highway. We were sleeping on the ground around the van when an army patrol woke us, a 16-year-old kid pointing his machine gun from my head to Dicks. We managed to convince them we werent CIA agents, just tourists on a surf trip, then made a beeline for the border of Costa Rica, which had the only sane government in the region and great surf breaks.

We had to scuttle our plan to stay there for a while when the volcano above our break erupted. So much ash fell between sets that the decks of our surfboards turned black and it was almost impossible to breathe.

Tom Frost and Yvon Chouinard at the forge in the early years Ventura - photo 6

Tom Frost and Yvon Chouinard at the forge in the early years. Ventura, California. Photo: Patagonia Archives

We drove south to Panama to ride breaks that probably had never been surfed before, and then, to get around the roadless Darin Gap, drove our van onboard a Spanish freighter bound for Cartagena, Colombia. Dick, famous for his night driving skills and aided by cassette tapes of Joplin, Dylan, and Hendrix, and a few other means power-drove all the way to Ecuador, where I knew of a surf spot Mike Doyle had discovered.

All this time Lito filmed our adventure with the wind-up Bolex. Doug had talked me into sharing the costs of the camera and film with him. He was convinced that once home, we the producers could sell the film to make enough to pay for the trip and then some. (When we got back, we spent more money editing the footage into a one-hour film, Mountain of Storms, which made it into a few specialty film festivals but was never distributed.)

We surfed in Ecuador, then sold our boards in Peru. In Chile we pulled out the skis and skinned up and skied down Lliama, a big volcano outside Temuco, and farther south, Osorno, sometimes called the Fuji of South America.

Just south of Puerto Montt the highway came to an end, blocked by deep fjords and the great tidal glaciers descending from the continental icecaps. We loaded the van on small ferries and crossed sapphire-blue lakes framed by beech forests and snow-capped volcanoes, off-loaded the van, and drove the short distance to the next lake crossing. In Argentina, on the leeward side of the Andes, the landscape changed suddenly from temperate rain forest to open steppes, and the Econoline, seasoned by over 12,000 miles of hard driving, barreled down the celebrated Route 40, the dirt road that, on the Argentinean side of the Andes, connects northern to southern Patagonia.

Miles later we left Route 40 and followed a road more like a horse track around Lago Viedma, one of a series of large, glacially carved lakes in the southern Andes. This was the worst road any of us had encountered, and we didnt see another vehicle for 180 miles. Then the trail petered out entirely. In those years only a footbridge crossed the Rio de las Vueltas, so we parked the Econoline and talked some army soldiers into helping us carry our gear to base camp. The only other humans in the region were the gaucho Rojo, and the widow Sepulveda and her sons, who ran a sheep station three days by horse from Lago del Desierto.

At that point we had been on the road for nearly four months; it would take us another two months to climb Fitz Roy. The peak had been summited only twice, first by the iconoclastic Frenchman Lionel Terray, who wrote that Fitz Roy was one of two climbs he had no desire to repeat. Terray built his reputation on ascents of peaks that were obscure to laymen but considered classics by climbers for their beauty or the difficulty of their routes. He understood that how you reached the summit was more important than the feat itself. His approach appealed to those of us who had cut our teeth on first ascents of Yosemites high walls, where you got to the top only to realize there wasnt anything there. Terray said it all when he titled his autobiography Conquistadors of the Useless.

Chouinard Equipment employees in 1966 Ventura California Photo Tom Frost - photo 7
Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «180° South: Conquerors of the Useless»

Look at similar books to 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «180° South: Conquerors of the Useless»

Discussion, reviews of the book 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.