Traveling Is My Form Of Self-education.

The Future Of Yosemite Climbing Lies Not In Yosemite, But In Using The New Techniques In The Great Granite Ranges Of The World.

We Choose To Believe That The Granite Is Alive. If Life Is Movement, Then Rock - With Its Atoms Flying Around Like Stars In Cosmos - Is Alive.

Just Why Is Yosemite Climbing So Different ? Why Does It Have Techniques, Ethics And Equipment All Of Its Own ? The Basic Reason Lies In The Rock Itself. Nowhere Else In The World Is The Rock So Exfoliated, So Glacier-polished And So Devoid Of Handholds. All Of The Climbing Lines Follow Vertical Crack Systems. Every Piton Crack, Every Handhold Is A Vertical One. Special Techniques And Equipment Have Evolved Through Absolute Necessity.

I Drive Old Cars, All My Patagonia Clothes Are Years And Years Old, I Hardly Have Anything New. I Try To Lead A Very Simple Life. I Am Not A Consumer Of Anything. And I Much Prefer Sleeping On Somebody's Floor Than In A Motel Room.

I Took A Dozen Of Our Top Managers To Argentina, To The Windswept Mountains Of The Real Patagonia, For A Walkabout. In The Course Of Roaming Around Those Wild Lands, We Asked Ourselves Why We Were In Business And What Kind Of Business We Wanted Patagonia To Be. A Billion-dollar Company? Okay, But Not If It Meant We Had To Make Products We Couldn't Be Proud Of. And We Discussed What We Could Do To Help Stem The Environmental Harm We Caused As A Company. We Talked About The Values We Had In Common, And The Shared Culture That Had Brought Everyone To Patagonia, Inc., And Not Another Company.