Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away By David Gelles Simon & Schuster, 2025, 310 pages

In the Tetons in the early 1950s we heard about a climber with a strange name who had taken a gigantic fall on a local crag. He survived with minor injuries, but many wondered how much longer he would be around.

Yvon Chouinard, in his late 80’s, is still with us. His varied, substantial accomplishments entitle him to at least one biography. David Gelles, of the New York Times , is a fine writer, but he is not a climber. His treatment of the earlier (climbing) part of Chouinard’s story is thin. He cites some of Chouinard’s major ascents, but not closely. While he devotes several pages to Chouinard’s long, accompanied trip to Fitz Roy, the highest peak in Patagonia, he has only a brief paragraph for the 1968 climb—just the third ascent of this dangerous peak. (This achievement furnished the seven-page lead article in the 1969 American Alpine Journal.) And there is but a passing reference to Chouinard’s classic Climbing Ice (1978). With his talent for devising innovative equipment, Chouinard revolutionized climbing on ice.

Regrettable also are the photographs—there aren’t any. We don’t see Chouinard on El Cap or in the Bugaboos, or demonstrating his ice climbing techniques; no portrait of his second wife, Malinda, an important player in the story (his first wife gets only two sentences); no view of Chouinard in Patagonia, the spectacular land that he did so much to preserve. Nor are there any maps of Patagonia.

Gelles, who wrote on business matters for the Times, is on firmer ground on Chouinard’s billionaire ascent. He guides us through the erratic but unstoppable transition from a small rock climbing equipment company, working out of a shed, to a major player in the corporate world. It is an engrossing story of setbacks (liability law suit, Covid) and great success, as Patagonia moved into the selling of apparel, with suppliers from all over the globe.

The book gives due credit to Chouinard’s invaluable friend, Doug Tomkpins. Starting as a dirtbag like Chouinard, his comrade on the Fitz Roy adventure, Tompkins found the North Face and devoted his fortune to land preservation in southern Chile. He died in 2015 in a kayak accident—in Patagonia with Chouinard, who was uninjured. Gelles became closely acquainted with Chouinard—accompanied him to Patagonia and on fishing trips—and admires him greatly. But he sees his flaws running a company: “he could be a micromanager at times, aloof at others, and he cycled through executives [...] He could be mercurial, indecisive, and elitist.” None of this prevented him from guiding the company to a success he could not have imagined in his dirtbag days. Patagonia would be worth some $3 billion. The climax of Chouinard’s story is his devotion of his fortune to the great task of conservation in Patagonia. His family co-operated in this striking commitment. Chouinard will be remembered for this magnificent effort, and for much else in his adventurous life.