(Repertório)
Patagonia's logo is a real mountain, and the founder of The North Face climbed it
In 1968, the founder of The North Face and the man who would start Patagonia climbed Fitz Roy together, and it became Patagonia's logo. Almost every logo mountain that lasts is one you can find on a map.
Mateus CremonDesigner, Cremon Studio · 4 min read
In 1968, Doug Tompkins, the founder of The North Face, and Yvon Chouinard, who hadn't started Patagonia yet, climbed a mountain together on the border between Argentina and Chile. The mountain was Fitz Roy. Years later, it became Patagonia's logo.
Tom May rounded up this one and a bunch of other logo mountains in a Creative Bloq piece on October 3. What stuck with me is that almost every logo mountain that lasts has a name. You can find it on a map.
Sixty days for Fitz Roy
There were five of them: Chouinard, Tompkins, Dick Dorworth, Chris Jones and Lito Tejada-Flores. They had been on the expedition for 60 days when they reached the summit on December 20, 1968, by a new line that became known as the Californian Route. It was only the third time anyone had climbed Fitz Roy.
Tompkins tells the story himself, in the account he wrote for the 1969 American Alpine Journal.
Dick Dorworth, Doug Tompkins and Yvon Chouinard on the summit of Fitz Roy, December 20, 1968, with their "Viva los Fun Hogs" banner. Photo: Chris Jones/"Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968" (Patagonia Books).
A guidebook and an artist
Years later, Chouinard handed the artist Jocelyn Slack a climbing guidebook with photos of Fitz Roy. She drew the silhouette by hand, working from those pictures. The logo debuted in the spring 1976 collection, and it's still on Patagonia's labels today.
I think a lot of that logo's staying power comes from right there. The guy who asked for the drawing had spent 60 days on an expedition to climb that exact mountain.
The North Face's Half Dome
The quarter circle in The North Face logo is a real place too. It's Half Dome, in Yosemite, a granite wall that looks like a dome sliced in half. The logo dates to 1971.
Half Dome in the late afternoon, Yosemite. Photo: Pierre Le Vaillant/Unsplash (CC0).
So both brands tied to that 1968 expedition carry a real mountain in their logos.
New logos still do it
And it didn't stop in the '70s. Vermont's tourism logo, launched in 2026 and designed by the agency DNCO, works Camel's Hump, one of the state's peaks, into the "m". The moon in the "o" comes from the state seal.
The Utah Mammoth, the NHL team, unveiled its logo in 2025. The mammoth's crown is made of Wasatch peaks, with the outline of Utah hidden in there.
The older ones are harder to pin down. The mountain on the Coors Light can is often said to be Wilson Peak, in Colorado, though the brand has never confirmed it. Paramount's, as the story goes, is Ben Lomond, in Utah, where the founder grew up. That one is more legend than history.
Toblerone lost its mountain
Toblerone used to have the Matterhorn in its logo, with a bear hidden inside the mountain. The bear is the symbol of Bern, the city where Toblerone has been made since 1908.
The bar in its old packaging, in front of the real Matterhorn, Zermatt, 2016. Photo: Alexandre Breveglieri/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
In 2023, part of production moved to Slovakia. Switzerland's "Swissness" law, in force since 2017, bars Swiss symbols on products that don't meet the country's origin rules. The Matterhorn came off the box, which now says "Established in Switzerland." The bear stayed. The mountain became just some mountain.
In 2025, the Swiss cross came back on most of the packaging, on the bars made in Bern. The Matterhorn didn't.
Even the generic ones
The logo for the 2030 Winter Games, in the Alps, is a mountain that could be anywhere. But its colors come from the pink the sun paints on the Alps early in the morning and late in the afternoon. Even when the mountain is generic, someone finds a way to tie it back to a real place.
Which mountain?
When a client asks for a mountain in their logo, a triangle with a snowy tip takes two minutes to draw, and it works for any brand, from anywhere. That's the mountain Toblerone was left with after 2023.
Patagonia has Fitz Roy. Before you draw your client's mountain, ask which one.
