From Associated Press:
North Face co-founder Tompkins dies in Chile accident
Douglas Tompkins, the co-founder of The North Face and Esprit clothing companies who bought up large swaths of land in South America's Patagonia region to keep them pristine, has died from severe hypothermia in a kayaking accident in Chile.
The well-known conservationist was 72.
The Aysen health service said the wealthy businessman and lifelong outdoorsman was boating with five other foreigners on Tuesday when their kayaks capsized in a lake in near freezing waters in the Patagonia region of southern Chile. Tompkins died later in the intensive care unit of the hospital in Coyhaique, a town 1,700 kilometers (1,056 miles) south of Santiago.
A bit more:
"Tompkins had been an outdoorsman all his life: a daring white-water kayaker; a skier with aspirations to compete in the Olympics; a serious mountain climber who once spent four weeks holed up in an ice cave with four buddies, waiting out an epic storm until they could finally blaze a new trail to the summit," Edward Humes wrote in "Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet."
North Face:
In the mid-1960's, he became one of the founders of The North Face, a small ski and backpacking retail operation in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood under the mantra to "Never Stop Exploring."
The brand has been ubiquitous in recent years in the U.S., as likely to be seen on the New York City subways as it was on ski slopes or in office building elevators. North Face made outdoor gear cool for teenagers, hipsters, suburbanites and celebrities. The activewear company is now owned by VF Corp. of Greensboro, North Carolina. He also founded the Esprit clothing company with his first wife, Susie Tompkins Buell.
Environmental:
After retiring in 1989, Tompkins was active in conservation and environmentalism. He used much of his fortune to buy hundreds of thousands of hectares (acres) in Patagonia, a sparsely populated region of untamed rivers and other natural beauty that straddles southern Chile and Argentina. On his Chilean land, he created Pumalin Park, 290,000 hectares (716,606 acres) of forest, lakes and fjords stretching from the Andes to the Pacific.
Tompkins was one of those rare people who actually put his money where is mouth is. We need more people like him...
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