The Dirtbag Myth and the Art of Media Spin
Of all the myths that shape the history of American climbing, the dirtbag climber—the broke, live-for-climbing archetype—may be the most enduring. From Lynn Hill to the Stonemasters to Yvon Chouinard, the stories all seem to begin with some version of poverty put on display. But why?
And... action. On a podcast, John Long and Rick Accomazzo, two members of the Stonemasters, recall that at legendary Camp 4, people were so broke that “there was no money to be made, except the fifty cents a night everyone was supposed to pay.” Lynn Hill has said that, to feed themselves, members of the group would finish food tourists had left behind on their plates at other campgrounds. Along the same lines, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard writes in his autobiography, À l’avant-garde (Glénat, 432 pp., 2020, €35), that he lived on “fifty cents a day,” spent eighteen days in jail for vagrancy in Winslow, Arizona (p. 41), and slept outside 200 days a year without a tent or sleeping pad.
American climbers regularly describe themselves as “dirtbags,” “rule breakers,” “rebels against consumer culture,” and people living “on the margins of society,” to borrow Chouinard’s words. He goes on: “God knows I often could have used a paycheck. The dirtbag life […] meant climbing a lot and sleeping in an old incinerator at an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp. We lived mostly on oatmeal, supplemented with poached grouse, marmot, or porcupine. On special occasions, we had spaghetti with a can of tuna from a San Francisco store that sold dented cans at a discount.”
Hobo, Phone Home
What makes this familiar picture interesting is how often it gets repeated. There is no reason to question the sincerity of these accounts. But it is worth asking how this particular founding myth took shape—and why, out of all the ways the people involved could have described their lives, this is the version that came to dominate the collective imagination.
Why elevate this part of the story above everything else that defined their way of life? Why the need to present themselves as a kind of beatnik hobo when, for example, Chouinard casually admits that “the first time [he] ever stood on skis was in the early 1960s, at Les Diablerets, Switzerland,” and that during those same years he sometimes spent the summer in the Alps? For a Californian, that required resources that seem hard to square with the image he describes.
There also appears to be a connection between how American climbers in the 1950s and ’60s saw themselves and the work of Jack Kerouac, the American writer and member of the Beat Generation. The same years produced strikingly similar stories: living in cars or riding trains, moving from one spot to another, getting by on a few cents, and sharing an “alternative” lifestyle with a small group of people, held together by improvisation, solidarity, and mutual help.
The story centers a person who, through nothing but personal effort and determination, without anyone else’s help, rises above ordinary circumstances.
One strand of American mythology embraced the hobo as a countercultural figure, a symbol of independence, freedom, and adventure. Kerouac became one of its prophets, and American climbers updated the character in the form of the dirtbag.
But even if the form owes something to Kerouac, the bigger question remains: out of all the possible ways climbers could have told their own story, why did this one stick? Why choose this particular image to represent themselves when, like anyone else, they could have emphasized any number of other parts of their identities? And above all, what values does that choice carry with it, even unconsciously?
Garage band
In Le mythe de l’entrepreneur, Anthony Galluzzo takes apart the legend of Steve Jobs. We all know the official story: “In the summer of 1976, in Los Altos, California, two young friends [Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Ed.] teamed up to build a computer they had invented, the Apple I. […] With no money, the two friends were forced to sell their few possessions to raise the capital they needed to buy parts. […] With no workspace, the two Steves improvised an assembly line in Jobs’s parents’ house. […] Before long, the small suburban home was overflowing with electronic components and circuit boards, so Paul Jobs [Steve’s father] cleared out his garage to make room for the company.”
But, Galluzzo shows, the same story could be told very differently.
You could put far more emphasis on Wozniak, an engineer at HP and the person who actually invented the Apple I. In that version, “Steve Jobs disappears, Steve Wozniak becomes the only genius on board, and Apple ends up looking like little more than an offshoot of Hewlett-Packard.”
You could also start the story earlier, with the hacker circles whose shared knowledge fed into Wozniak’s work and eventually helped make the Apple I possible. “The figure of the brilliant, solitary entrepreneur […] dissolves into the hacker collective,” Galluzzo writes.
Or you could begin later, with Mike Markkula, whose connections in finance helped structure and grow what was still a start-up. “The final version of the story […] presents the company not as the work of two penniless geniuses, but as the creation of a network of California financiers,” Galluzzo notes.
In other words, Apple’s history cannot be reduced to the solitary genius of one or two young men “with no money” who “improvise” on their own and end up transforming an entire sector of the economy. There is no inherent reason to place so much emphasis on “the garage version.” That is a choice—a way of framing the story that puts one part of it in the spotlight while pushing the more collective, less glamorous parts into the background.
The same story can be told many ways.
Together, they form a class of self-made climbers: people who supposedly overcame every obstacle through their own strength, persistence, and genius, broke new ground, and transformed climbing, hardened by the harsh conditions of a life outdoors.
So why choose the garage version? Why emphasize the isolation and outsider status of the genius? According to Galluzzo, the point is to frame success and merit as individual achievements. The story centers a person who, through nothing but personal effort and determination, without anyone else’s help, rises above ordinary circumstances.
At heart, it is the classic American self-made-man myth. We have heard the story countless times. But Galluzzo, a French researcher and lecturer, argues that it is a marketing construction designed to concentrate all the credit in one person while obscuring the collective forces that made the success possible.
Impostor Syndrome?
It seems to me that Yosemite climbers rely on the same narrative structure.
Chouinard offers his own “garage version” when he writes that his “first blacksmith shop was in the chicken coop in [his] parents’ backyard in Burbank.” With the Stonemasters, the hobo costume serves a similar purpose: these are outsiders, people who live on the margins, extreme but likable, free from ordinary rules—and who, precisely because of that, manage to pull off extraordinary feats despite what everyone else thinks.
When it repeats this familiar mythology, it instead becomes a remarkably effective vehicle for classic free-market individualism, repeating many of its oldest assumptions.
Together, they form a class of self-made climbers: people who supposedly overcame every obstacle through their own strength, persistence, and genius, broke new ground, and transformed climbing, hardened by the harsh conditions of a life outdoors.
But if Apple’s history can be told very differently from the version the legend handed down to us, there is no reason to assume climbing is any different.
We could tell these climbers’ stories by focusing on something other than bohemian poverty. We could start by looking at where they came from, their family and social backgrounds, and the social, economic, and cultural resources they may have inherited. We could also focus on what made California in the early 1960s such unusually fertile ground.
Seen that way—at least in this part of the story—climbing is paradoxically not much of a “counterculture” at all. When it repeats this familiar mythology, it instead becomes a remarkably effective vehicle for classic free-market individualism, repeating many of its oldest assumptions.
The dirtbag becomes a costume for the purest “spirit of capitalism.” Beneath the image of frugality and withdrawal from consumer society sits a deeply individualistic figure carrying a familiar anti-government ideal.
There is nothing particularly revolutionary, after all, about arguing, as Chouinard does in À l’avant-garde, that “government agencies are bogged down in bureaucracy” and that individuals should be able to “decide where their money goes.” You can hear that argument at any meeting of business owners.
Wrapped in climbing culture and embodied by the dirtbag, that message allows sport to become a vehicle for accepting dominant social norms while appearing to reject them.
Climbing then becomes a way to legitimize individual merit and solitary success: the idea that success owes nothing to anyone else, and therefore should not be bound by the same rules as everyone else.
More quietly, it can also make us forget how much of what happens to us depends on the material conditions we find ourselves in. It is easy to see how convenient that can be for people from higher social classes, because it helps justify their position: if they succeeded, it was because they started with nothing and made it happen through sheer effort—not because, from the beginning or somewhere along the way, they found themselves in the right conditions. (“The Right Conditions” is also the title of a documentary by Julie Gavras about France’s future elites, Ed.)
And if you failed, then the failure is entirely yours.
The dirtbag figure, then, is neither trivial nor harmless. It is a political tool, even if the people who use it do so sincerely and unconsciously.
Another history of climbing is possible—one that is collective and genuinely democratic. All it takes is a change in perspective: stop looking up at a handful of “great men” and “geniuses of the sport,” and start paying attention to the work of collectives instead, as Guillaume Goutte does in Alpinisme et anarchisme.
Read: Anthony Galluzzo, Le mythe de l’entrepreneur (La Découverte, 2023, 240 pp., €20.50).
