Patagonia Dreaming: Kris Tompkins Works to Build the Best National Park

Kristine McDivitt Tompkins—then McDivitt, always Kris—had not made many big life changes, so maybe it was time. On the Sunday before Christmas 21 years ago, she closed the door and turned the lock on her beach house in Ventura, Calif., a place right on the water where she and her surrogate family of work friends had hung out for 20 years. One gave her a lift to LAX, where she caught a flight to Santiago, Chile. There she boarded a second, smaller jet bound for Puerto Montt. After a 26-hour trip she arrived at the farmhouse of her future husband, Douglas Tompkins. He lived off the grid, without a phone, at the far end of the Reñihue fjord, surrounded by thousands of acres of temperate rain forest. The nearest supermarket was two hours away. Kris had with her two duffel bags, spoke only gringo Español, and had “a one-line résumé,” because, she adds with a quick laugh, “I’d only had one job my whole life.”

For 13 years she’d been chief executive officer of Patagonia, the California outdoor apparel company famous for its high-end parkas, eco-activism, and advertisements to shop less. Starting as an assistant packer at 19 during a college summer, she had figured out whatever needed figuring out when founder and owner Yvon Chouinard’s method for underwriting his hobbies—fly fishing, mountaineering, surfing—became a growing business in the early 1970s. On her watch, the company more than quadrupled to $120 million-plus in annual revenue. Still, she was restless. “I looked around and I could see the rest of my life. There would always be interesting challenges, but I’d be doing the same thing in 10 years, at 50 and 60. So I took a giant leap of faith.”