MY LIFELONG ADVENTURE IN BUSINESS took root in Southern California. My family had moved from Lisbon, Maine, to Burbank, California, in 1946, when I was eight, because my mother, the real adventurer among us, thought the drier climate would help my father's asthma. My father was a tough French Canadian who worked as a journeyman plasterer, carpenter, electrician, and plumber, and I had an older brother and two older sisters.

It was in California that I would discover climbing, at age 15, in the outskirts of Los Angeles, after helping found the Southern California Falconry Club in the early fifties. One of the adult members, Don Prentice, taught us how to rappel down to the falcon aeries on cliffs, showing us how to wrap manila rope (stolen from the telephone company) around our hips and over our shoulders to control the descent. Through high school and into my years as a student at Valley Junior College, in Valley Glen, California, I started hanging with young members of the Sierra Club—a group that included Royal Robbins, who would go on to start his own successful clothing company, and Tom Frost, an aeronautical engineer who would become my business partner from 1966 to 1975—and climbing the sandstone cliffs of Stoney Point, at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, and at Tahquitz Rock, near Palm Springs.

By the time I was 18, my climbing buddies and I had migrated to the big walls of Yosemite. Because we were pioneering long routes requiring hundreds of piton placements, I bought an old forge and taught myself blacksmithing so I could make my own hard-steel pitons. (The softer European kind didn't work well in Yosemite's uneven granite cracks.) During the sixties, I worked on my equipment in the winter months, spent April through July on the walls of Yosemite, and during the heat of summer headed out for the Alps and the high mountains of Wyoming and Canada—all interspersed with surf trips down to Baja and mainland Mexico. I supported myself by selling homemade gear out of the back of my car, supplementing my meager income by diving into trash cans and redeeming bottles for cash.

By 1971, two important things had happened: I'd met and married Malinda Pennoyer, an art student at Fresno State who spent summers working as a cabin maid in Yosemite and who would go on to become my partner in all aspects of the Patagonia business; and I had produced my first clothing: knickers and double-seated climbing shorts made from superheavy corduroy produced by an old mill in Lancashire, England. Back then, "active sportswear" consisted of your basic gray sweatshirt and pants, and standard issue for Yosemite climbing was tan cutoff chinos and white dress shirts bought from the thrift store. Though I just wanted more durable and comfortable climbing clothes for myself and my friends, I soon realized I had stumbled onto an entirely untapped market.

In the early seventies, my company, Chouinard Equipment, took over an abandoned meatpacking plant in Ventura and began to renovate its old offices as a retail store. Customers were responding to our "hand-forged" clothing, and we sold more and more items, including Chamonix guide sweaters, classic Mediterranean sailor shirts, canvas pants and shirts, and a technical line of rainwear—a predecessor of Gore-Tex—called Foamback. The apparel was such a success we decided it needed its own name to distinguish it from Chouinard Equipment's hardware line.

A few years earlier, in 1968, several friends (including Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face) and I had taken a six-month road trip to the tip of South America, surfing the west coast of the Americas down to Lima, Peru, skiing volcanoes in Chile, and climbing 11,073-foot Fitz Roy, in Argentina's Patagonia. To most people, especially then, Patagonia was a name like Timbuktu or Shangri-La—far off, interesting, not quite on the map. It seemed like just the right idea for our clothing. To reinforce the tie to the real Patagonia, in 1973 we created a logo with a stormy sky, jagged peaks based on the Fitz Roy skyline, and a blue Southern Ocean.

We debuted our pile sweater—the precursor to our Synchilla fleece—in 1973; it was made from a polyester fabric intended for toilet-seat covers. Then we launched our first polypropylene underwear, in 1980, and became the first company to preach the virtues of layering. This new type of high-performance "system" amounted to blockbuster success: From the mid-eighties to 1990, sales skyrocketed from $20 million to $100 million. Most companies would relish such rapid growth, but for us it was nearly disastrous.