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Outside Magazine November 2001
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King of the Dirtbags (Cont.)

WE MET AT THE Elkhart Park trailhead, on the west side of the Wind River Range, at noon on a forest-fire-dry day in August. I had the gear and the llamas, Josey Wales and Guy Sado; Yvon had the food and the Hawaiians, George and Kent.

It would be hard to find two more good-natured brothers than the Kams. They're Yvon's buddies from another of his life passions: surfing. George, 40, is as ebullient and outgoing as a maître d'. He had retired at the age of 32 after making a small fortune as a marketing manager for apparel companiesin the surfing industry.

"It's just fashion, really," George said, smiling. "But everything's fashion. For every real-life surfer, or climber, or fly fisherman, there are a thousand wanna-bes."

Kent, 42, is quieter, but equally open. He had designed and built surfboards, then worked as a commercial pilot, and now is a firefighterin Honolulu, where he lives with his three-year-old daughter and his flight-attendant wife.

We weren't on the trail an hour, Guy Sado trotting along like a trouper and Josey Wales already showing ominous signs of being an outlaw, when out of the blue Yvon said, "Who needs a $450 raincoat?"

He was apparently reacting to the conspicuously outfitted backpackers we'd been passing on the trail, many of whom looked to be carrying the entire inventory of a small outdoor shop.

"What's wrong with getting wet!" Yvon cried.

When I reminded Yvon that Patagonia Inc.—the $223 million clothing company that he founded and owns, lock, stock, and barrel—sells precisely such items, he groused, "I know. I know. But they don't need them."

Hypothermia is what's wrong with getting wet, of course. And Yvon knows it—few men have spent more time in the mountains. Climbing together in Yosemite for a week last year, we'd talked for hours about shell design, and he'd gone on at length and in exquisite detail about the engineering of seams alone. Still, Yvon is prone to radical pronouncements. He's like an old philosophy professor of mine who started every class by posing a new existential problem: "Who can prove to me that the world wasn't created ten seconds ago, complete with memories, fossils, and computer files?"

"Yvon likes to say and do things for the shock value," says Doug Tompkins, a fellow climbing pioneer and business-man who has been Yvon's close friend for over 40 years. "It shakes people up. Gets them thinking."

While George, Kent, and I each carried a pack with shoulder straps and a hipbelt, Yvon carried his with a tumpline strapped across his forehead. He learned this trick 20 years ago during a 45-day expedition across the Himalayas. He claimed the United Nations had done a study on tump-lines and found that, once your neck and back muscles were sufficiently developed, they were more efficient than shoulder straps and hipbelts. "I had chronic back pain until I started using a tumpline," Yvon declared. He'd sent me one and I'd tried it, but found I was walking miles staring at my feet instead of the landscape—just like the women I'd seen humping conical baskets of rice all across Asia.

On our first night in the Winds we camped in a brittle alpine meadow beside seemingly fishless Seneca Lake. I put up our tent—Yvon had relented on this issue—while he gave dryland fly-casting lessons until dusk. Kent was a natural. George, in his enthusiasm, sometimes forgot the ten-and-two dictum. (Norman Maclean: "It is an art performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o'clock.") I was no better with a rod than I had been as a kid.

After dark, sitting around the camp stove, Yvon said he knew a guy in Bozeman, Montana, who lived for years in a stainless-steel, tubular camper that you entered from underneath. He was a master welder and was working on fuel-efficient stove designs at Yvon's bequest.

"You know, your average kitchen stove is a total piece of crap," he said. "They're over 80 percent inefficient. Imagine if the pot set down inside an insulated casing. The heat lost to the air would be minimal, the fuel efficiency dramatically increased."

It was a good example of the way Yvon's mind works: constantly questioning, rethinking, reformulating, innovating. As George told me, "It's Yvon's instinctual quest for the best. He's always looking for ways to improve everything. How to make it better, simpler, lighter, more environmentally friendly. I don't know anyone like him. In everything he does, he strives for perfection."

"You should hear him talk about board design," says John McMahon, a California stockbroker who's another one of Yvon's surfing buddies. "He wants to create the perfect surfboard."

It galls Yvon that most surfboards break so easily; he's offended by anything that's disposable but doesn't have to be. Quality and simplicity have always been guiding principles for Yvon and his wife, Malinda. Their son, Fletcher, 26, spends his days working on the problem, building and shaping surfboards in a shop less than a stone's throw from the shed in Ventura, California, where his dad once shaped pitons. Their daughter is a designer as well—says Yvon, "She has a very clear sense of what is practical and functional."

Where Yvon can sometimes be caught up in his own ideas, Malinda is the pragmatist. She interprets their vision, she sends the e-mails, she makes things happen. She is the nexus.

"Yvon has always been willing to push forward without a template," says novelist Tom McGuane, a passionate fly fisherman and a longtime friend. "He is not bound by psychological cintures like so many of us, but it is Malinda who has given him this freedom. Malinda allowed Yvon not to lose contact with his instinctive ability to take great leaps forward. She is always there. Malinda is a visionary just like Yvon, but she's the tactician, the one behind the scenes. Without Malinda, many of Yvon's ideas would never have seen the light of day. What Yvon and Malinda have, really, is a very productive, very creative partnership."




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