The Blacksmith and His Accidental Empire

The Anvil and the Open Road

It began not with a business plan, but with a bird of prey. Yvon Chouinard was a fourteen-year-old kid in Southern California in 1953, a member of the local falconry club. The adult leaders taught the boys how to rappel down cliffs to reach the falcon aeries, and in that vertical world of wind and rock, something clicked. This was not a sport; it was a way of moving through the world. He and his friends, names that would become legend in climbing circles—Royal Robbins, Tom Frost—taught themselves how to scale the big walls of Yosemite. The tools of the trade, however, were a problem. The soft iron pitons imported from Europe were designed to be hammered in once and left behind. Chouinard and his cohort, pioneering new multi-day routes, needed to place and remove their gear repeatedly. The European pitons would warp and fail. So, he decided to make his own. In 1957, Chouinard went to a junkyard, bought a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs, and taught himself how to be a blacksmith. His workshop was a chicken coop in his parents' backyard in Burbank. He hammered his first pitons from an old harvester blade, crafting them from a harder chrome-molybdenum steel. They were reusable, they were strong, and soon, everyone wanted them. He could forge two an hour and sold them for $1.50 apiece. Before he knew it, he was in business. But the term "business" was a loose one. Chouinard loaded his portable tools into his car and lived the life of an "existential dirtbag," as he later called it. He traveled the California coast, surfing. He spent summers in the Rockies and Yosemite, sleeping outdoors for more than 200 nights a year. He supported himself by selling his steel pitons from the back of his car, his diet supplemented by dented cans of cat tuna and poached ground squirrels. This wasn't entrepreneurship. It was a way to fund a life of purpose, a life lived on the rock and in the surf.