California Route, 1968

December 20, 1968: 8 p.m.. Funhogs, from left, Dick Dorowrth, Doug Tompkins, and Yvon Choinard on the summit of Fitz Roy. Photo by Chris Jones,

It was an epic journey, a wild and historic climb, an unusual adventure, a formative experience. In the context of the era and the lives we were living, the 1968 Funhog trip from California to Patagonia and the climb of Fitz Roy was a natural, even logical, step on the endless road of self-awareness and consciousness.

The climb, the trip, and the films—Fitz Roy, which Funhog Lito Tejada-Flores made, and the longer Mountain of Storms, which was made with Lito’s footage and distributed by Patagonia—are, in certain circles and for good reason, relatively well known. The films are a fine depiction of the Funhogs in action, but understanding the social and cultural context from which they emerged is helpful to an appreciation of the significance of them, as well as the trip, the climb, the people involved, and their later paths in life.

Our route up Fitz Roy, now staidly known as the California Route, we originally called the Funhog route. We were of the 1960s generation in America, all in our twenties and inherently, purposefully, counter to the mainstream culture. “Cool” was giving way to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Joan Baez played the music we wanted to hear.

With us as with many others of that generation, internal reflection was more important than external appearance; personal growth took precedence over material acquisition. And honesty, realization, and discernment were a lot more interesting and real than the kind of 1960s thinking that put half a million American troops in Vietnam, assassinated John F. Kennedy, Bob Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and allowed Ronald Reagan to opine that if you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.

jones_chris_0053 It was 1968, an iconic year in American culture that focused the forces of the decade into indelible images, sounds, experiences, and struggles too well known to require listing here. The counterculture’s vision of hope and change was wildly creative and idealistic, and it would be some years before we recognized that the members of the counterculture as well as their dreams had been lost into the mainstream and were barely visible apart from it. A few more years passed before it became apparent that some of those people and their values and dreams of a better world had not been lost, forgotten, or destroyed. Some of those people, as well as their values, were working (and continue to work) from within the mainstream. As our Funhog brother Yvon wrote in 2012 in The Responsible Company, “Most fundamental changes start at the margins and move toward the center.” The question is whether the change reaches the center and affects the whole or gets lost in platitudes and inaction along the way.

Like the journey to Patagonia and the Fitz Roy climb, reaching the center and affecting the whole is the only path to freedom for a Funhog. Every life has the same end, so it is the journey of that life, not its destination, that matters. Freedom, self determination and personal growth are found in the present moment of every mile, every breath, every move of each climb, trip and relationship. Freedom is not found in a future goal, though it might be discovered along the path to that goal. That path, like climbing, recognizes that hope, change, and wild idealism require patience, persistence in the face of difficulties, and an awareness that resolution is its own reward.

It’s more interesting and fun to honor the reality that no two redwoods are the same, and that if you’ve seen one redwood . . . you’ve seen one redwood. We are sustained by each redwood truly seen, and we evolve by understanding and being inspired by the differences between each tree, person, culture, mountain range, and creature of the earth. The Funhogs of 1968 were on the road of realizing in each present moment the truism of the iconic John Muir’s observation: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” If you’ve seen one redwood, you’re connected to them all.

Five years before our journey Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had driven the psychedelic painted bus “Furthur across the country. Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which immortalized that trip, became required reading. Kesey in 1963 was somewhat insulated by a more tolerant society and laws against unreasonable search and seizure while driving across America in a psychedelic bus advertising counterculture values, but we could not rely on such an emancipated reception by the military sentries at the borders of Central and South American nations.

I wrote in my book Night Driving,

 

I found myself the steady driver on the graveyard shift. I drove a lot of those 18,000 miles [sic] in the dark with all or most of the others asleep. Since we were passing through the borders of several of the most militaristic, suspicious, backward countries of the world, with jail and justice reputations bad enough to make us want not to get involved, we agreed beforehand to travel in a manner so as to make Mr. Clean seem, by comparison, the dirtiest, skunkiest, smelliest, most suspect traveling salesman ever to be caught crawling out of your thirteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom window at dawn. And so we did, with me unbelievably accomplishing some of the longest, hardest night driving of my career, completely straight. I had some astonishing (to me) adventures and lessons and experiences and, you know, revelations on the nighttime roads of South America during that trip.

 

jones_chris_0011 On the morning of July 16—Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Lito Tejada Flores and I—gathered in the utilitarian yard of Chouinard Equipment in Ventura, California, to begin a six-month, 16,000-mile journey in a 1965 Ford Econoline van to Patagonia. It was the first time I met Yvon. As the member of the group with the least climbing experience, I was not expected to participate in the actual Fitz Roy climb except to carry a few loads up the lower glaciers. When Doug first proposed the idea of the journey I accepted that, but as the trip progressed and I became more connected to both the intention of the trip and my comrades as friends, I did not. The counterculture not only connects all things, it tends to be all-inclusive, 100 percent as opposed to, for instance, 1 percent and 99 percent.

I wound up at Chouinard Equipment that morning through a friendship with Doug Tompkins. We had met a year and a half earlier through skiing when I was a graduate student in English at the University of Nevada and Doug was running the North Face in San Francisco. The business was at the forefront of what Jack Kerouac termed “the rucksack revolution,” which eventually changed the outdoor retailer and manufacturing industry of America from the margins of society to the center. Doug had been a companion on a drive from Whitefish, Montana, to Reno, Nevada, after a day skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. That drive included an all-nighter filled with conversations about life, its choices, and its passions. I made some decisions during and after that drive that altered the course of my life and described them in Night Driving:

 

I heard for the first time on that trip the words “Chouinard” and “carabineer,” both of which were to become interwoven with my life within a couple of years. When we arrived in Reno, just before a February dawn, tired and wired, and ready to come down in the bed I had been away from for a week. . . . I went to see the head of the University of Nevada English Department and told him there was no way I would ever again endure another deathly dull graduate seminar, a morbid sentence inflicted on people so lazy and unimaginative as to have nothing better to do than attend graduate school, a punishment specializing in creating a previously unknown and unnecessary “problem” (trace the development of R.W. Emerson’s writing, as seen in the history of American literature, beginning with Jonathan Edwards) and then talking that “problem” into the ground, nay, clear through the crust into the bowels of the earth and on out the other side, China, where the people are more intelligible than those experts on the English language who haunt graduate seminars. I retired from that world a few hours after that trip, and I never felt better, as if the fatigue of 10,000 years on the front lines had suddenly been removed.

 

jones_chris_0005 Having purposely sabotaged my half-hearted mainstream career path to become a professor, I detoured for the summer of 1967 to work and live in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was the summer that the Beatles released their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and 30,000 people attended the Gathering of the Tribes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park a prelude to that fine city’s Summer of Love. Afterwards, I scurried back to the mountains where I belonged and could most comfortably pursue internal reflection and personal growth.

That winter I taught skiing at Squaw Valley. Among my fellow ski instructors was the inimitable, brilliant, irrepressible Lito Tejada-Flores, a long-time friend and climbing companion of Tompkins. Lito and I quickly became friends and spent many enjoyable hours skiing together and discussing any and everything that we found interesting and fun, including skiing. Doug joined us during breaks from San Francisco; it was a very good winter of skiing and sorting through the options of life. Sometime that winter Doug began talking about a plan to spend the summer driving the length of South America with a couple of friends—including Lito as well as that guy Chouinard who made carabineers—to climb some peak in Patagonia. Lito would make a film along the lines of The Endless Summer, and though he had never made a film before, Lito was brilliant and could figure it out. “And would you like to join us?”

The answer “Yes,” was the right one, despite having never climbed, not having much money, and a couple of personal matters, including a gravely ill mother, that would surely encourage those of a different mentality to stay close to home. When I discussed Mom’s prognosis with her doctor and told him about the trip, he told me she might live ten minutes or ten years, and there was nothing I could do for her. He advised me to go to South America. (I was able to show Mom the film Lito made of the trip before she died. She loved it.)

The answer was “Yes,” and I knew it, but I didn’t say so for awhile. Meanwhile, a couple of synchronistic people and events popped up along my road to commitment.

English Annie was wintering in Squaw. She knew Lito and a few other friends, and became part of our circle. Annie was waiting for her Scottish fiancé to return from a climb in South America. His name was Dougal Haston and he failed to get up something called Cerro Torre. When Dougal came to Squaw to join Annie, I didn’t know a Cerro from a Torre or that he was one of the great alpine climbers of the twentieth century, but we met and formed a fast and fine friendship rooted in several late night philosophical discussions washed down with lots of alcohol.

Dougal was a great drinking companion and, while usually a man of few words, a superior conversationalist once he chose to open up. One night he asked, “Wud ya like ta learn ta climb?” The answer “Yes,” was the right one and given not because I cared about learning to climb, but because I enjoyed Dougal. For the next few days he dragged me up some crags around Tahoe and Truckee. When Dougal returned with Annie to Europe he left me with a basic climbing education and I was hooked. From the first day on the Truckee Boulder, climbing filled that missing piece of my life that had been empty since the end of ski racing three years earlier.

Synchronism is never singular. To the intellect alone, the synchronistic is nothing more than meaningful coincidence, but by that stage of the 1960s the counterculture was familiar with more than peace and love, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was Carl Jung who wrote:

 

Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever occur. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents. . . . Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.

 

That same 1968 winter I made friends with a dirtbag ski enthusiast by the name of Jim Bridwell who was interested in improving his skiing. I let him join my ski classes without paying, and he offered a return payment in kind: If I ever wanted to learn to climb, just track him down in Yosemite after the ski season and he would show me around. In those days Bridwell spent half the year in Yosemite. That was before Doug invited me on the trip south, before meeting Dougal, and I wasn’t interested in climbing and didn’t think much about Jim’s offer. A couple of weeks after Dougal took me climbing I had gained a different perspective, and after the ski season ended I went to Yosemite where I was welcomed into Bridwell’s extremely counterculture camp within the more moderate counterculture of 1968 Camp 4.

For nearly a month I spent every day with Jim and some of his friends on the fine vertical granite of Yosemite, climbing as hard as my novice’s developing skills would allow, and partying every night as hard as my veteran’s developed skills could handle. It was a great time because of Jim’s generous friendship and climbing guidance, but it was a few years before I fully appreciated that he was arguably the finest rock climber of his generation, and the leader of a particular counterculture lifestyle of Yosemite climbing.

So, though I was a novice climber on the morning of July 16, 1968, when the Funhogs first gathered in the yard of Chouinard Equipment to begin our journey, I possessed the rudiments of the climbing basics, taught to me by two of the greatest climbers of the time. I was about to expand that education on a climbing trip with three other preeminent climbers in America: Chouinard, Tompkins and Tejada-Flores. I wrote in my journal that night: “Chouinard I like immediately. He is open and warm and I know he can be tough. Doug and Lito are the groovy shits they are.”

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A month into the trip, in Peru, we picked up the fifth Funhog, one of England’s top climbers, Chris Jones, just after he had finished a new route on the northeast face of Yerupaja. How could a counterculture-beatnik, hippie, dirtbag-ski-bum, gradschool-dropout, soon-to-become-a-confirmed-vegetarian, peace-lover, and Vietnam-war-protestor writer not tune into Jung’s simple, direct perception of synchronicity as the continuous creation of a pattern? I mean, I was supposed to go climbing. I was supposed to go on the trip to Fitz Roy. I was supposed to be a Funhog.

We all were. It was the natural next exploration in the ongoing adventures of our lives. I don’t think any of us in our wildest dreams could have imagined in 1968 where the Funhog trip would take us, or how it would influence and color our lives. More than forty years after that morning I was bemused to receive a phone call from a friend alerting me that I’d made that day’s Wall Street Journal.

Whatever one thinks about the WSJ’s journalistic standards or editorial policies, it is not a publication attuned to the values of the counterculture of the 1960s. Even the most active imaginations of 1968 would not have predicted it to ever publish a photo and story about the Funhogs. But all those years later, there we were in a photo taken July 16, 1968, at Chouinard Equipment with the Funhogs and Chouinard’s then partner Tom Frost standing by the Ford van just before we began the journey south. The story was about Doug and Yvon, of course, and their separate but overlapping paths from dirtbag-climber luminaries to successful and wealthy businessmen, to world leaders in environmental and social justice activism.

No one in that photo would have imagined that in 2012 Tompkins would write,

 

Today there is growing recognition that wild nature is in a survival struggle, and that the fate of civilization is bound to the fate of the oceans and the climate. It appears that we are muddling toward ecological Armageddon and yet root causes are seldom explored and discussed. . . . The notions that people are in charge of nature, can effectively manage the earth solely for human ends, and can escape the ecological consequences of their own actions, are intellectually indefensible. Yet the entire collective human enterprise continues to be steered down these cognitive dead ends. Climate change, the extinction crisis, the depletion of resources of all kinds, and resulting economic social crises can be seen as the inevitable products of our collective delusional thinking . . . it is essential that we shine a bright light on the delusional dogma of unending growth if we are to remake our economics under different terms, and share the planet in a way that allows evolution to flourish again. Anything short of that will lead to darker and darker days.

 

Doug’s 2012 clarion call to action for a better world is rooted in the counterculture values of the 1960s, but offered in the awareness that the world’s population has doubled since that time. As mentioned, synchronism is never singular.

We left Chouinard Equipment that day and a few days later we were surfing in Mexico, a new endeavor for me as noted in my journal:

Surfing is a bloody difficult game to pick up. . . . 

I had a great day but I have not yet ridden a wave. Tompkins is not too bad, Yvon is very good. . . . He is very strong—the little guy in life who set out to show all the big guys that they must extend to keep up with Yvon Chouinard. And they must. . . . Lito (Fellini) played with his camera most of the day. It’s incredible to watch him going gnomelike about his business with his shy-looking eyes and joyous grin. When he was done and I was tired and burned he tried my board. He, too, thinks it’s a tough game.

jones_chris_0001 Mexico, the first country we crossed on our long road south, set the tone for the journey, the climb, and our roads of consciousness and self-awareness. And that road was a tough game; it was a constant test of our abilities to learn, to change, to grow, and to absorb the reality and lessons of the world. It also tested our ability to give back continuously while persevering in the face of every difficulty, detour and instance of implacable ignorance or deception. But the road was great fun, meaningful in ways we intuited, but would not understand until later.

We arrived in Mexico City a week after leaving California to find it bursting with preparations and energy for the upcoming summer Olympic Games. Those games turned out to be a milestone of the 1960s for several reasons. On October 16, black Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medal winners in the 200-meter sprint, stood on the podium, received their medals, and gave what was termed a “Black Power” salute, but which they called a “human rights” salute. Their friend, silver medal winner Australian Peter Norman, wore a human rights badge on his shirt to show his support. That gesture (and the photo of it) was a milestone in the civil rights movement in America.

For Smith and Carlos’s courage and integrity, International Olympic Committee president, Avery Brundage ordered them suspended from the US team and banned from the Olympic Village. When the United States Olympic Committee at first refused on principle, Brundage threatened to ban the entire US track team from the games, which led to the shameful compromise by the USOC of expelling Smith and Carlos from the Games and sending them back to the United States. When Brundage was president of the USOC in 1936, he had made no objections against Nazi salutes at the Berlin Olympics, arguing (in 1968) that the Nazi salute, being a national salute at the time, was acceptable in a competition of nations, while Smith and Carlos’s salute was not of a nation and therefore unacceptable. Brundage and much of what he represented was a part of what the counterculture of the 1960s recognized had to be changed in order for there to be hope.

There is more to a journey than the drive, more to a climb than the mountain, more to a film than meets the eye, and a Mexico entry from my journal resonates with the spirit of the entire trip:

 

July 23, 1968. Mexico City. We met a girl named Wanda Klor who has a Mexican mother, a Russian father, was born in Mexico and raised in San Jose, California. She looks about 22, is only 17, and she offered us a room above her apartment. Her mother, naturally, kept close watch on Wanda and wouldn’t let her go to dinner with us. But the room blew our collective and individual minds. Full of boxes, but newly painted in black and red, the first thing one sees are the giant letters WELCOME spread on the wall across from the door. The entire ceiling is a circular black stripe on red starting at the light and revolving out to the edge of the wall. (Or does it begin on the outside and work inward to the light?) On the wall on the right as one enters there is a square in red built of triangles against the black. Next to it is a peace symbol. The wall on the left is all red. It is very striking and reflects much thought, work, time, and, dare I say it, love. There were some collages she had done revolving around love, peace, brotherhood, and very reminiscent of the Bay Area scene.

We had a good sleep and this morning Wanda came by to say good bye before she left for work. The point is (or is there any “point” in nature?) that she gives with no reservations or questions. She gives and that is enough. I will probably never see this girl again, though I would like to; but I, and I think the others, take something of her with me.

That is the point. The question is: what do we give in return and when and to whom? I feel it does not matter so long as we do give.

 

jones_chris_0005 And on the evening of December 20, 1968, we reached the summit of Fitz Roy by giving 100 percent of ourselves to get there. I ended a 1969 Summit Magazine article about the climb with these words:

Afterwards, something remains beside the memory, but it is something else than the experience. It is like food for the spirit—it nourishes, giving strength for another day. 

Just before the summit, when we knew it was in the bag, Chouinard summed it up, “Well, now we have earned our freedom for awhile.”

The Funhogs were lucky. Sometimes you can give everything and still not reach the summit. But summits are less important than having hope, making change, and insisting on the freedom to seek personal growth and honest, internal reflection of the kind that, to paraphrase Tompkins, shines a bright light on every delusional dogma that views every redwood as the same while ignoring the hard, frightening reality that the earth’s human population has doubled since the Funhogs climbed Fitz Roy.

Keep on shining, fellow Funhogs of the world, keep on shining that bright light.

About the Author:

Cover 40 Adobe Garamond ProDick Dorworth was passionate about ski racing in his youth and set a number of records that stand to this day. His path crossed with several notable climbers and he was sucked into the world of mountain climbing, which he pursued with equal passion. He has written numerous ski articles, and authored three books: Night Driving, The Perfect Turn, and The Straight Course.

This excerpt is from Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968 by by Yvon Chouinard, Dick Dorworth, Chris Jones, Lito Tejada-Flores and Doug Tompkins. Patagonia Books™ © 2013. This excerpt and these photos are published here by permission of Patagonia Books™, www.Patagonia.com/Books