When Yvon Chouinard, the climber and environmentalist and the co-founder of the outdoor-apparel company Patagonia, spends days by himself at a house he owns in Moose, Wyoming, his wife, Malinda, the other co-founder, often sends mass e-mails to their friends, with the number of the landline there. “He likes phone calls and will be alone,” she’ll write. Chouinard, who is seventy-seven, has a cell phone but hardly ever turns it on. He does not use e-mail and disdains the proliferation of devices. He considers Apple to be a manufacturer of toys. “I’m getting more and more marginalized,” he told me. “My friends are constantly e-mailing with each other, and I’m excluded.” To the suggestion that he take it up, he says, “It’s too late.” On his own in Moose, he fly-fishes, reads, ties flies—and fly-fishes some more. He can fish all day. He does not require an audience, although he likes to have someone around to outfish. Taciturn as he may be, he still prizes company. He has a lifelong habit of collecting garrulous friends and yet a tendency to induce some measure of taciturnity in all but the most voluble of them. His style of reticence is contagious.

Chouinard spent the heart of this past summer as he often does, wandering around the northern Rockies, visiting old friends, and fishing the prime trout streams of the greater Yellowstone region. He did so with one good arm (rotator-cuff surgery, in June), a scarred cheek (basal-cell removal, in July), and a heavy reliance on his tenkara fly rig—a simple pole with no reel, the latest implement in his long-running crusade for simplicity and thrift. Now and then, he checks in with the office—Patagonia headquarters and his primary home are in Ventura, California—but for days at a time no one really knows where he is. Malinda sends e-mails to the people he is supposed to be with, in case there are things he should hear or do. He’s less involved in the management of the company than he used to be, but since he got into the gear business, more than fifty years ago, he has frequently disappeared for months, sometimes for half the year, to climb, kayak, surf, ski, fish, and ramble around the planet’s wilder precincts, whose preservation he has dedicated the better part of his life to. He comes off, these days, as deeply disheartened, perhaps even defeated, and yet Patagonia is bigger, and more active in environmental and labor advocacy, than it has ever been.

On a Thursday night in late July, Chouinard sat in an easy chair by the window of the Moose house, ice pack on his cheek, glass of red wine in hand, left leg up on the arm of the chair. He had on flip-flops, tan fishing pants, and a green Salmonid Restoration Federation T-shirt, which a young busboy at a café had complimented an hour before, to no reply from Chouinard. A high-country twilight had him half in shadow. The window faced west, out onto a sage-and-wildflower meadow of several acres, and, beyond that, a phalanx of cottonwoods and spruce, and, beyond those, the Tetons, with the sun now sunk behind the dusky silhouette of the Grand. Chelsea Clinton was on the radio, introducing her mother at the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia.

The property is just north of the Jackson Hole airport, on the east side of the Snake River, up by the entrance to Grand Teton National Park. He and some friends built the house in 1976, out of beetle-kill lodgepole pine. It was one of the first log houses in the valley, on six acres he’d bought for fifteen thousand dollars an acre. It’s simple and small, a relic of a different idea of mountain living. (“Now everyone builds these huge trophy log houses,” he said.) The house was strewn outside with gear and inside with bric-a-brac: nature books, binoculars, the sheet music to “Don’t Fence Me In,” which the family sings at weddings. The only neighbor, in the early days, was Malcolm Forbes. Now there are seldom-used vacation houses on all sides. “They got me surrounded, the fuckers,” Chouinard said.

Jackson has boomed as a skiing and recreation town, as a national-park gateway, and as a tax haven for rich people attracted by Wyoming’s absence of a state income tax. Though probably eligible for residence, Chouinard would never consider such a thing. “Oh, God, no,” he says. “I happily pay my taxes.” The northern Rockies aren’t Clinton country. “I was at a rodeo in Livingston, and they burned Hillary in effigy on the rodeo grounds,” he said. He first met the Clintons in 1992, when Bill was running for President. A banker had a dinner for them in Jackson. “I guess we were the only Democrats in the county, so they invited us,” Chouinard said. “Chelsea was twelve at the time, same age as my daughter, Claire.” (He also has a son, Fletcher, who’s a few years older.) “The day before, Claire had dyed her hair orange with Kool-Aid. Claire and Chelsea got along great. Other than that, I don’t remember much.”

Hillary Clinton came on the radio. Chouinard hadn’t turned on any lights. The darkness in the house deepened as she spoke. He absent-mindedly flicked at a lamp cord, like a cat with a toy, and dispensed occasional blunt opinions. Of Tim Kaine, he said, laughing, “That guy’s a full-on nerd!” When Clinton mentioned the value of compromise, he said, rolling his eyes, “It’s the work of the Devil.” He and Patagonia have fiercely opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “I’m on Obama’s shit list,” he said. “I’ve become an isolationist, actually. Anything of any seriousness that happens has to happen on a local level. I think we’re seeing the end of empire, the end of globalism. It can’t hold. People will revert: protecting your family, protecting your village. Like the Dark Ages. I honestly believe that.” He added, “Trump is the perfect person to take us to the apocalypse.”

He listened to Clinton. The high-pitched political oratory seemed almost to pain him. He’d long ago despaired of the process, and of its inadequacy to address what he deems the existential threats to our climate, our food and water supplies, and the survival of life on earth, in any recognizable form. After listening for a while, he said, “Nobody’s mentioning global warming. No one wants to deal with it.” As though on cue, Clinton said, “I believe climate change is real!” But then she moved on to other wedges: immigration, the minimum wage.

“That was her environmental message?” Chouinard said. “Oh, God.”

Outside, the mountains had disappeared. Vague shadows flitted past the window—bats. The phone rang. Chouinard stood stiffly and answered. It was Malinda. He shut off the radio and turned on a few lights. “One half a sentence about global warming,” he complained. “That’s dismal. Jesus Christ. We’ve got another Obama—another city kid who’s never been out in nature.” They talked for a while, and then Chouinard rinsed out his wineglass and went to bed. Plan was to be up by five for a road trip to Montana, to the Crow Indian Reservation, where he had a date to teach some Crow kids to fish. The local level.