15 minute read
Marc-André Leclerc
Beyond impossible
Writer and climber Mark Jenkins ponders the audacious exploits and soulful purity of Canadian alpinist MARC-ANDRÉ LECLERC, whose story is told in the new documentary The Alpinist
Words MARK JENKINS
Mountain tension: Marc-André Leclerc, shown here on Torre Egger in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, soloed dozens of groundbreaking routes
Higher calling: Leclerc, the protagonist of The Alpinist, had a deep thirst for experience that matched his outsized talents
Leclerc soloed Mount Robson without telling the filmmakers. “It wouldn’t be a solo to me if somebody was there,” he later said
“If you’re not young and brash between the ages of 17 and 24 you might as well shoot yourself, because that’s when people are young and brash.” So says Alan ‘Hevy Duty’ Stevenson – hula-hoop virtuoso, twinkle-eyed raconteur, and unofficial mayor of the rock-climbing community in Squamish, Canada – describing Marc-André Leclerc’s exuberant passion for climbing. “He belongs in a different era – the ’70s or ’80s, when it was wild. He’s a man out of his time.” These words capture the boundless joy and mortal intensity of The Alpinist, a film about one of the youngest, boldest and best of this breed in mountain-climbing history.
In the opening scene, we witness Leclerc soloing a vertical ridge of horrid rock and useless snow, a delicate, deathly dance. As the camera pans out, you realise the young climber is more than 1,000m from the ground, and a nauseous feeling grips your stomach. Alex Honnold, star of the Oscar-winning film Free Solo and perhaps the most famous climber in the world today, is narrating the scene: “This kid Marc-André Leclerc. Canadian guy. Hardly anyone has heard of him because he’s so under the radar. He’s been doing all kinds of crazy alpine soloing. He just goes out and climbs some of the most difficult walls in the world. The most challenging that anyone has ever climbed.”
In 2015, after Leclerc, then 22, made the first solo ascent of the Corkscrew route on Cerro Torre in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, local climbing legend Rolando Garibotti called it “an ascent of earth-shifting proportions”. In the film, after Leclerc solos Mount Robson, the holiest and scariest mountain in the Canadian Rockies, veteran expedition leader Jim Elzinga states that Leclerc is “redefining what’s possible”. Canadian Barry Blanchard, who pioneered extreme alpine routes several decades ago, proclaims, “This is the evolution of alpinism, and it’s happening right now in our backyard with this young guy.”
Given Leclerc’s otherworldly ability and equanimity in the face of death, The Alpinist could easily have been yet another bad outdoor documentary – headbanging punk rock laid over some superbody with a chalk bag, pulling a roof. No wonder mainstream film critics have largely ignored the genre. For too long, documentaries in this space have lacked character development, history, a real narrative. They’ve lacked irony or hypocrisy, doubt or nuance, betrayal, hatred or all the other dark things that make us human.
I’ve waited 25 years for outdoor documentaries to grow up. A handful have transcended the genre’s action-focused limitations: Touching the Void (the 2003 documentary of Joe Simpson’s near-fatal descent of Siula Grande), even with the reenactments; Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog’s 2005 film about US bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell), which has the grizzliest audio of any documentary ever; Meru (the 2015 chronicle of the first ascent of the Himalayas’ Meru Peak via the Shark’s Fin route), with the stunning cinematography of Renan Ozturk; 2018’s The Dawn Wall, a film that finally talks about the honour of true friendship; and of course Free Solo. These films laid the foundations for The Alpinist, which plumbs the depths of a climber’s craft and creative soul better than them all.
Hard act to follow: Leclerc became best known for his audacious alpine ascents, but his skills on rock were also off the charts
The Alpinist does what all great films do: it tells a story. The story of a driven young man drawn inexorably to climb immense, ice-plastered peaks. Yes, we watch him solo unimaginable lines, ropeless and as preternaturally calm as the clouds beneath his boots, but we also see him as a dorky, gangly kid enraptured by the outdoors. We see him lost and loaded on acid, tripping into a world he barely escapes (and only then because of his girlfriend). We see his boyish visage covered in blood after a big fall. We see him living in a stairwell like a proper dirtbag. We see him shy and inarticulate under the spotlight of nascent fame. Most importantly, we see Leclerc through the voices of others: his girlfriend, renowned climber Brette Harrington; his mother, Michelle Kuipers; and a host of famous Canadian alpinists. Even the greatest mountaineer of the 20th century, Reinhold Messner, has a few portentous words: “Solo climbing on a high level is an expression of art. Maybe half of the leading solo climbers of all time died in the mountains. This is tragic and it’s difficult to defend.” In The Alpinist we get to know, if not fully understand, not only a climber but a human being – his strengths, weaknesses, desires and derangements.
One of the first things you learn about Leclerc is that he’s deeply camera-shy and doesn’t give a fuck about fame. He truly is a throwback, as Hevy Duty says, to an earlier age. Believe it or not, there was a time when top climbers didn’t tell their followers what they had for lunch. Pre-social media, you shared your stories with your actual friends, preferably around a campfire. On an expedition, you spent time with your team discussing life, logistics and the weather. On my last few big trips, my teammates, with the modern magic of a satellite modem, spent their evenings sending images of themselves that masterfully massaged their public personas and completely misrepresented their actual feelings. Leclerc couldn’t give a shit. He’d solo something heinous and not tell a soul.
His disregard for the media was problematic for the film’s directors, Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen. A perfect example is when Leclerc solos Mount Robson without telling them. When they finally get him on the phone, he explains, “It wouldn’t be a solo to me if somebody was there.” It ain’t easy to make a film about a man who doesn’t care what the world thinks. He’s like an Olympian who performs in his own gymnasium, without a single spectator, doing moves no other human can.
If Leclerc’s cavalier attitude towards their film frustrated Mortimer and Rosen, they also admired him for his singularity of vision. “Marc was out there every day since he was a teenager,” Mortimer says in a phone interview. “To look at his climbing résumé, you’d think he must be 75 years old. He can’t resist the pull of the mountains. When a weather window opens, he has to be out there. He was on a vision
SCOTT SERFAS
Nature boy: The Alpinist shows Leclerc the super-gifted climber, but also the dorky, gangly kid enamoured with the outdoors
Gripping the moment: only a handful of elite climbers can free-solo hard rock routes, but free-soloing alpine routes is even tougher
Hitting his peak: Leclerc atop the famed Northeast Buttress of Mount Slesse in British Columbia
quest. It was pure. He didn’t have time or interest in thinking about the media or our film. We were capturing Marc-André when his potential was becoming his reality.”
Leclerc typically kept only three people in the loop: his mum, sister Bridget, and Harrington. They understood who he was and why. He’d text them from the summit of one peak after another just to let them know he was safe. “Some of the climbs he did were changing the face of alpinism,” says his mother. “He was enough of a climbing historian to know that, but he had a total lack of interest in being famous.”
Talking with Kuipers provides an insight into how Leclerc became who he was. Growing up, money was tight. “But it’s all about perception,” she says. “There are an endless number of things you can do without money; you just have to activate your imagination.” Without a car, the family walked everywhere. When it was raining and cold, Kuipers would create a story that imagined the children as intrepid explorers escaping someplace dangerous, or on their way to rescue a friend.
Leclerc was a voracious reader, and from the age of four he knew the tale of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s pioneering 1953 summit of Everest. “He had a fascination with mountains from the beginning,” says Kuipers. Home-schooled from third to sixth grade – “Marc-André would drive his sister crazy by talking in rhymes all day” – before skipping seventh, Leclerc was intellectually and physically precocious, but socially awkward. Aged 14, he worked in construction with his dad to pay for his climbing gear. At 15, he screwed eyebolts into the beams in his basement bedroom and began hanging from his ice tools.
As a youth, Kuipers says, “he spent a lot of uncomfortable nights out in the mountains, alone”. He became competent in how to deal with difficult situations. In the film, we see Leclerc trapped in a snowstorm in Patagonia but keeping his head and downclimbing to safety. We see him soloing the stunning Stanley Headwall in the Canadian Rockies, hanging precariously but precisely from his tools, the picks hooked on mere millimetres of rock. His sangfroid is spellbinding.
But then so is his love for his girlfriend. From the earliest days of their relationship, Harrington and Leclerc were inseparable. They lived in the stairwell together, in the woods together; they climbed and climbed and climbed. “Marc is interested in intense experiences, living to the fullest,” Harrington says laconically in the film. When I speak to her by phone, she acknowledges that she was the same way, and this mutual need for life in extremis explains, at least in part, why they fell so deeply in love. “We matched in intensity,” she says. “The most meaningful experiences of my life are the climbs I’ve done in poor weather, in extreme places. I like that sort of thing.”
Leclerc was the same. “He arrived in this world enraged to be in the body of a helpless infant,” says Kuipers. “He needed to start moving immediately. As soon as he could crawl, we were both a lot happier.”
Notably, however, when Leclerc became a climber, this wilful rambunctiousness didn’t translate into a disregard for hazards like avalanches and icefalls. Leclerc would study every aspect of a mountain to determine the safest possible line. He would check the weather incessantly, calculating the exact number of hours before the next storm and how many it would take him to get up and down. As he says in the movie, “You can control what you’re doing, but you can’t control what the mountain does.” Kuipers recalls how one day Leclerc bicycled to Mount Slesse, soloed it three times by three different routes, but then called to get a ride home because he didn’t want to cycle across a narrow bridge during rush hour. “He was not a casual risk- taker,” she says. “He was very clear on how much he disliked objective risk. Overhanging seracs, bad weather – he preferred not to take those chances.”
Both Kuipers and Harrington feel the film does an excellent job in capturing the irrepressible spirit of Leclerc. Still, Harrington believes The Alpinist doesn’t fully express his technical mastery. “Marc put his whole life into rock climbing,” she says. “More than 90 per cent of the time we were climbing with a rope. Marc valued all aspects of climbing – aid climbing, ice climbing, alpine climbing – and wanted to be really well-balanced.” It wasn’t just about mixed
“We matched in intensity,” says Brette Harrington, shown here on a climb with her partner Leclerc
climbing or soloing: “Marc could climb 5.13 slab.”
Kuipers agrees. “Yes, Marc-André came into climbing with a lot of natural skill, but to get to where he did took years of single-minded dedication. I remember him practising clipping a carabiner over and over.” Leclerc practised his craft hour after hour, week after week, year after year. As he pulled off bolder ascents, people expressed dismay at the juxtaposition of his age and ability – most alpinists take decades to get that good – but his mum wasn’t surprised. “What is it that they say, 10,000 hours? Marc-André did that.”
This is self-evident watching him climb in The Alpinist. Whether he’s rock climbing, ice climbing or mixed climbing, Leclerc’s movements are graceful and fluid. No jerky jumps, no too-long reaches, no desperation. There’s an almost sloth-like slowness, like a modern dancer performing a difficult manoeuvre. (I remember a mentor of mine telling me that to climb fast you must climb slow.) Experience creates confidence; confidence creates a calm mind; a calm mind creates a calm body; a calm body is capable of astonishing climbing.
You can see Alex Honnold climbing with this kind of self-possession in Free Solo, but there is a deep chasm of difference: Honnold is climbing on solid granite, whereas Leclerc is on the most fickle of substances, ice and snow, and beneath this fragile layer is the kitty litter they call rock in the Canadian Rockies. If free-soloing hard rock routes is only for a handful of the most skilled climbers, free-soloing hard alpine routes – with the constant risk of avalanche, serac collapse, changing conditions, and little chance of retreat – is in the welkin of the gods.
Furthermore, Leclerc did his solo ascents ‘onsight’ – on routes he’d never even sunk his ice axes into before. Honnold practised the route he soloed on El Capitan for Free Solo again and again with a rope; Leclerc would show up below a massive mountain face and set off into the unknown. Would the ice be sticky and ‘thunker’ or hollow and treacherous? Would the snow be ‘styrofoam’ or bottomless mush? Nothing had been practised, nothing was wired or dialled. Onsight free-solo alpine climbing is the absolute tip of the arrow in the variegated world of climbing. There’s no margin of error, no net – there’s nothing but you. Imagine you’re an archer and you must hit the bullseye with every arrow or be executed. This is onsight alpine free-soloing.
The casual viewer might see Leclerc as an adrenalin junkie. This is the misconception of most non-climbers. In truth, adrenalin is the enemy of good climbing. If you’re frightened, your ‘reptilian’ amygdala – one of the most primitive parts of your brain – takes control, and your cerebral cortex is left out of the decision-making. This is when you do stupid things. A large part of climbing is learning to control your fear. The very best climbers shut off their fear like flicking a light switch.
Right before the very end of the film – the actual coda is a tragic plot twist best left unsaid here – as we witness Leclerc pulling onto the summit of an ice- encrusted tower, alone, we hear the voice of his mother. “A lot of us live our lives thinking of the things we’d like to do, or the adventures we’d like to have, but we hold back,” she says with hope and pride. “That’s what really stands out to me about Marc-André’s journey. What is it that you would do if you were able to overcome the things you see as limitations, or the things you’re afraid of? What would you do?”
The Alpinist leaves you dumbfounded by Leclerc’s prowess and nerve – climbers will be talking about this movie for years to come – but, unlike other good outdoor films, this is not the heart of the story. It is the portrait of an artist as a young man. Like Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s literary alter ego, Leclerc allows us to witness an awakening – physically, intellectually and emotionally – of the human spirit. Through ardour and intensity, he becomes who he dreams of becoming, right before our eyes. The Alpinist is showing at cinemas nationwide and available to stream later this year; thealpinistfilm.com
In The Alpinist, we get to know not only a climber but a human being
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