Red Bulletin UK

Marc-André Leclerc
CLARK FYANS, MARC-ANDRÉ LECLERC
“Some of the climbs
he did were changing
the face of alpinism”
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
Strong hold: Leclerc on the south-west ridge of
Baby Munday Peak in British Columbia
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 risktaker,”
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
THE RED BULLETIN 55