Reborn in the Wild: Rick Ridgeway

by KIT STOLZ

Rick Ridgeway, in his newly-released memoir, LIFE LIVED WILD: ADVENTURES AT THE EDGE OF THE MAP, writes that he was born 72 years ago in Southern California, but was reborn on October 13, 1980, on a high mountain named Minya Konka in the Tibet autonomous region in china.

On that day Ridgeway and his friends Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia; Kim Schmitz, an expert climber; and Jonathan Wright, a photographer and business partner, had climbed all day from a base camp to set up a 2nd mountain-climbing camp at about 20,000 feet. Having completed that arduous task, and climbed down a steep section with care, they were whooping it up as they slid rapidly towards the base camp far below on their butts, still roped together.

“Then it happened,” writes Ridgeway, describing his sudden bewilderment as the snow around him began to rise “... as if it had started to boil.” In an avalanche gathering speed, he fell and began to tumble, trying to curl himself into a ball with space in front of him for the air he would need to breathe should he have to dig himself out of snow when he came to a stop. In the eternity of a moment’s plummet downward, he surfaced briefly.

“Suddenly time slowed. I breathed deeply and exhaled deeply, and in that brief second, I managed to calm my thoughts,” he writes. “I looked ahead as the entire slope of snow we were riding, the tons and tons of snow, pitched into space.”

“Died October 13, 1980,” he thought in that moment. “Thirty-one years old. Buried in Tibet.”

To his surprise, Ridgeway emerged from that fall of as much as 2,000 feet bruised but not seriously hurt. Chouinard came to consciousness waist deep in snow, concussed and confused, with blood pouring down his face from a head wound. Schmitz was screaming in pain from a broken vertebra and other injuries. Ridgeway found Wright facedown on ice, immobile, and mumbling incoherently. Ridgeway pulled him upright and began to resuscitate him. Despite his fervent efforts to breathe life into Wright, which at first seemed to succeed, Wright soon stopped breathing, went pale, and died in Ridgeway’s arms.

Ridgeway has never forgotten that moment and, like Chouinard, still thinks of it every day.

Just thinking of climbing on avalanche prone slopes now gives him goosebumps. Yet he considers himself to have been “reborn” in that instant. In an interview in a modest home under large oaks in the East End, sitting cross-legged in an armchair, he explained that it changed his relationship not just with the mountains he climbed, but with his time remaining.

“I was reborn in the sense that I was able to renew my sense of what it means to be alive by learning to do a better job of living in the moment,” he said in an interview. “Not to live in the past and not to live in the future in the way I was in the habit of doing — always thinking about what project I was going to do next — but like most kids seem to be able to do, to be more fully engaged in the moment.”

After the avalanche, Ridgeway built a bier of fl at stones on Minya Konka’s lower slopes and buried Wright’s frozen body under the rock, with prayer flags mounted on glacier wands fluttering in the wind. He came down with the climbing party doubting himself, overhearing the muttering complaints of those on the expedition who blamed him and his team for the avalanche. He thought his mountain-climbing days might be over.

A few months later, while in Kathmandu on a lower elevation assignment for National Geographic about a national park, he told the admired Sherpa Pasang Kaji, known as PK — with whom he had successfully climbed Everest, even though Ridgeway himself had not reached the summit—- that he was thinking of giving up expedition climbing. PK told him that was a good idea, shook his hand, and reminded Ridgeway that he was still young. He could still marry and have children and figure out a different kind of life.

Days later, Ridgeway met a striking woman in Kathmandu. Her name was Jennifer Fleming. She came of age in the fashion industry, and happened to be there on assignment for Calvin Klein.

Despite her elegant attire and pricey luggage, Ridgeway invited her on a three week hike through the planned Nepalese national park around Everest. “But the furthest I’ve ever walked is from a cab on Fifth Avenue into the front entrance at Bergdorf Goodman’s!” she shot back.

Despite the enormous differences between their lifestyles — fashion-conscious Jennifer would never sleep in a tent, far less explore wildernesses with Ridgeway — they married in 1982, and settled down happily in Ventura County. Jennifer found work at Patagonia as its first advertising and photo director, where she pioneered the outdoor clothing fi rm’s photographic focus on real-life adventurers in the wilds around the world. She worked at the headquarters in Ventura for years, and together they raised three children — Carissa, Cameron, and Connor.

With a few deprecating remarks about the dating woes of climbers such as himself and his peak-obsessed pals, Ridgeway lets readers know that he considers the wooing and wedding of his beloved “Bella” (Jennifer) to be the most meaningful of his feats, far surpassing any of his adventures.

Ridgeway is not a big man, but he has broad shoulders and broad features and strong hands. His gaze is steady; he answers questions with barely a movement, but is on his feet in a fl ash to show o personal treasures, including four volumes of Robinson Jeffers, the poet, standing in a prominent position high on his wall of bookshelves, as well as large paintings of the uncommon pheasants Ridgeway raised as a boy with his grandfather, and the wooden box — the “altar” — that Ridgeway made for his late wife Bella.

In the l980s Ridgeway continued in his work documenting adventures, such as a journey on foot across Borneo. Two highly successful corporate leaders, Frank Wells of Warner Brothers and Dick Bass, an oil and gas executive and ski resort owner, invited him to go with them on their mid-life quest to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents.

Although intrigued, Ridgeway told his wife that he thought it was too risky. “But it might be more risky not to go,” she said, adding that it might mean Ridgeway was not being true to himself, to his own nature. Besides, she said, “You need to stay open to getting to know new people.”

This resonated with Ridgeway, who already had come to the conclusion that he climbed mountains not for fame or glory, but for the unrivaled company of his fellow adventurers, and for the privilege of experiencing the wild in places where few if any people had ventured before.

Ridgeway had spent 68 days above 18,000 feet as part of a months-long expedition climbing K2, the 2nd-highest mountain on earth. But even after standing on the summit — and after a close encounter with frostbite and the near death of one of their team — Ridgeway writes that he and his partner almost forgot to take the traditional triumphant photograph at the summit.

“I had no feeling of conquering anything,” he writes. “We were two tiny humans on top of the world’s most awesome mountain, and the mountain was indifferent. I held my ice axe across my waist, shoulders down, and stared into space. John [Roskelley] took the photo, and we started our descent.”

In the 20 years that followed, Ridgeway and some of his friends — including Doug Tompkins, the founder of The North Face and one of four adventurers, including Yvon Chouinard, who explored Patagonia in a station wagon in 1968 — morphed into an ad hoc team of so-called “Do Boys” exploring some of the wildest places on earth. With friends new and old, Ridgeway climbed unexplored mountains in Bhutan, dodged polar bears in the Arctic while observing rare Beluga whales, climbed a rock spire in the Amazon with the help of local Yanomami tribal guides, and kayaked a river in the Russian Far East with network anchorman Tom Brokaw and others.

Ridgeway stayed in touch with his late friend Jonathan Wright’s wife and his daughter, Asia, and 20 years after her father’s death on Minya Konka, when she had been just a baby, Asia asked him to take her there to find her father’s grave. Ridgeway had doubts. His wife did not.

“Of course you’re going to take her,” Jennifer said to him. “Asia isn’t just asking you to help her find her father. She’s asking you to be her father.”

This journey took months. The two went first from Nepal to the alpine steppe of the Chang Tang plateau in western Tibet; then to join pilgrims circumnavigating the sacred Mount Kailash; then to the summit of an unnamed, unclimbed mountain 21,000 feet high in the almost unvisited Aru Basin; and finally to the slopes of Minya Konka. As documented in Ridgeway’s earlier book, Below Another Sky, the last journey to the gravesite, where they found Wright’s body disturbed — perhaps by snow leopards — and in need of reburying, brought them both to tears. Together they rebuilt the bier. Asia placed a brass plaque on her father’s grave, and positioned the last stone, just as Ridgeway had done 20 years before.

Three years later, despite his trepidation about working for one of his closest friends Chouinard, Ridgeway accepted a full-time job as the chief of Patagonia’s environmental and sustainability efforts. He still found time to go on adventures — such as a 300-mile traverse of the unoccupied high Tibetan plateau occupied by the endangered Chiru antelope — but increasingly devoted himself to saving endangered species around the world.

Under his leadership as director of environmental a airs, among other efforts, Ridgeway expanded the company’s “Worn Wear” clothing and equipment repair program, launching a Worn Wear blog telling the stories of both the clothes and the adventures that their wearers have had in the wild. The blog remains active, and the repair program employs 70 people at its central warehouse in Reno, NV, repairing over 100,000 customers’ worn clothes for free in 2019.

In 2009, amidst the Great Recession, Ridgeway noticed a New York Times story describing a small cohort of people who while under financial pressure were choosing to buy fewer items than in the past, but of higher quality, even if they cost more.

“I read that and thought: These are our people,” Ridgeway said. “These are the kind of people we want to attract at Patagonia, because we make the best quality stuff . We also encourage people to fix it if it’s broken. We have now the biggest apparel repair center in North America, outside of the government’s. So we realized this required a partnership with our customers. We called it an “upside-down loyalty program.” Most companies create a loyalty program to incentivize customers to use more of their goods and services. We wanted to incentivize our customers to use less, and keep it longer, and wear it out more.” This thought gave Ridgeway the daring idea to run a full-page Black Friday ad in the New York Times, right behind the usual Macy’s ads, with a photograph of one of their bestselling jackets and the headline above it:

“DON’T BUY THIS JACKET.”

“I remember talking to the New York Times, and they were so stoked because they assumed they had a new customer, and we were going to be like Macy’s. And then when we sent them the mock-up for the ad they just shit, because, they had never seen anything like that.”

Ridgeway has now lived in the Ojai Valley for 30 years, after first moving to Ventura County in large part for the opportunity to surf. He explains that in the winter, the Channel Islands block the swell from reaching Malibu, where he had been living, so at that time of year he often found himself going to the Oxnard area to surf with his adventuring buddy Yvon Chouinard.

“I was getting more and more frustrated with Malibu,” Ridgeway said. “It was a land of poseurs — all these movie people who were pretending to be other than what they were. And so I asked Yvon one day when I was up here if he could keep his ears open for a house to rent and he called up one day and said, ‘Well there’s a house for sale on the beach where I’m at.’ I didn’t think I could possibly afford to buy a house but it was hardly anything. It didn’t even have regular stud walls, just posts in the sand with plywood.”

Ridgeway and his Bella lived for a time there on the beach, but the arrival of children and their schooling in Ojai changed the Ridgeways’ minds about where to live.

“The kids were first at Montessori and then later at both Ojai Valley School and Oak Grove, depending on their temperaments,” he said. “My wife was coming up to Ojai twice a day sometimes to take the kids to soccer practice, or to play at friend’s houses, and finally one day she said, ‘I’m over it. I want to move to Ojai.’ I said fine. So we came up here in the early ‘90s, and it was a perfect place for the kids. It worked for them and it worked for us, so I’m still here 30 years later.”

Ridgeway has suffered two great losses in recent years, the death of his good friend Doug Tompkins, the co-creator of an enormous new national park in Patagonia, and that of Bella.

He lost Tompkins while on a kayaking adventure in Patagonia that nearly took his own life as well. Bella he lost to pancreatic cancer. He treasures both their memories, and for Bella he had an “altar” made for her of a black oak fallen on a neighbor’s property, a standing chest containing her ashes and personal objects sacred to them both.

He continues to plan adventures — though he’s more interested now in long walks than in mountain climbing — and he continues to get out on walks and even runs, “talking back” to his body when his knees ache or his legs complain.

About Ojai, Ridgeway expressed confidence about its future, despite the Thomas Fire and other crises. He felt this after battling the Thomas Fire around his house and his neighbor’s, and after seeing how friends and acquaintances supported those who had suffered.

“When I tell friends and acquaintances that I’ve been here for 30 years, people frequently say, “Oh, you must have seen a lot of changes.’ And I can say that yeah, I’ve seen a few, but really very few. The population has been relatively stable, and the character of the town is so much the same. The only thing that’s really changed is the number of visitors we have on the weekends, but you know, I kind of lean into that. I don’t use side streets to avoid going through the middle of town, I always go that way. I enjoy watching people visit the town and I admire the arcade and when I go into town to have lunch or shop I meet new people all the time and that’s cool. So I’m okay with the increased tourism.”

And he still gets out into the mountains, even if they’re 20,000 feet lower than the Himalayan peaks he climbed in his youth.

“One of my favorite things to do in the Ojai Valley is to go up the Pratt Trail really early in the morning. I’m still thankful I can keep a good pace. I can get up to the fi re lookout by nine in the morning and have breakfast and watch the glory of the morning spread across the Ojai Valley and beyond to the ocean, and see the islands out there on a clear day, and have just a wondrous hike and feel like I’ve been up Everest.” Ridgeway grins a little — gap-toothed, a glint in his eye, alive to the thought of it. “You know?” Day twenty-five of our foot traverse across the he said. “It’s a thrill.”

Jim “The Bird” Bridwell’s tattoo predated by about three decades the resurgent popularity of body art. photo: © RICK RIDGEWAY