Cliffhangers

There are two types of people in the world: adrenaline junkies and the rest of us. But even among adrenaline junkies, a spectrum of risk tolerance (or rather, risk pursuit) exists. I thought I’d seen the most extreme end of that spectrum a few years ago, watching Free Solo, the mesmerizing Oscar-winning 2018 documentary on rock climber Alex Honnold. I’m forced to revise that opinion, however, after seeing the 2021 rock climbing documentary, The Alpinist. And like Free Solo, The Alpinist is one of those rare movies that I’m still thinking about a week later.

The hero of our tale is Marc-André Leclerc, a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind climber from a farming community in British Columbia. At first glance, Leclerc comes off as a typical dreamy, half-stoned college kid. But the laid-back vibe belies a talent and drive of world-historical proportions.

Leclerc was diagnosed with ADHD as a child. He had difficulty sitting still, and longed to be outside, doing things. More and more, school felt like prison for Leclerc, so when he discovered rock climbing, he embraced it with every fiber of his being – here was a way out. After graduating high school, Leclerc moved to Squamish, the climbing mecca of British Columbia, where he quickly and quietly ascended the local peaks, and along with them, the ranks of BC climbers. Leclerc was hungry, “not afraid to jump right into the deep end,” as one peer expressed it. He was also “a true dirtbag,” with no car, no phone, sleeping in a stairwell – and living the dream. His legend grew in Squamish, but not much farther. In the age of selfies and social media, Leclerc avoided tooting his own horn. It was as if climbing was a secret that he kept for himself.

The trail picks up with the film’s co-director, Peter Mortimer, catching wind of Leclerc’s latest exploit – an unheard-of ascent of The Corkscrew Route in Patagonia’s Cerro Torre Range – and wondering why Leclerc remained unheard-of. A pattern emerges for the duration of the movie, with Mortimer and his team trying to track down Leclerc who, in keeping with his low-profile M.O., consistently neglects to apprise Mortimer of his whereabouts.

Along the way, we’re introduced to some of the relevant authorities and characters, like Hevy Duty, the elder statesman of the Squamish climbing community, who spins a mean hula hoop and still sports a Yorkshire lilt after decades in North America. In contrast, we have Bernadette McDonald, a climber and writer who could be mistaken for Martha Stewart, with her buttoned-down style and dry demeanor. There’s Reinhold Messner, the old iconoclast, who speaks of the best solo climbing as art, and he would know. Messner was first to summit Mount Everest alone and, on a prior trip, first to summit it without supplemental oxygen – rarified air indeed. There’s also Brette Harrington, Leclerc’s adoring girlfriend and a talented climber in her own right, as well as Honnold himself, who names Leclerc as the climber he’s most impressed with at the moment.

In fact, Free Solo turns out to be the perfect entrée to The Alpinist – you might think of the latter as Free Solo 2.0. The first movie teaches us about the elite niche of rock climbing that is free soloing, and follows Honnold as he prepares for a single, epic climb, of Yosemite’s El Capitan. For the uninitiated, there is rock climbing, which is a very dangerous activity, even with ropes. But a select few practitioners view rock climbing with ropes, and with other people, as not interesting enough. Hence, “free soloing” – encountering the mountain alone, with only your wits, abilities, and a chalk bag to deliver you.

Even within the free soloing community though, Leclerc stands apart. Modern life tends to specialization, and rock climbing is no exception. Leclerc, on the other hand, is comfortable climbing rock, snow, and ice – sometimes all in one ascent. My palms were sweating watching Honnold on the sheer granite face of El Cap in Free Solo, but The Alpinist takes it up a few hair-raising notches, with scenes of Leclerc clinging precariously to 5,000-foot-high frozen waterfalls by nothing more than a pickax, as he patiently probes above with the other ax, over and over, for purchase. To say that this is not how I would choose to spend my Sunday afternoon is to beggar the definition of the word “understatement.”

Leclerc’s climbing ethic also has a purity to it – to use Messner’s term and call it “art” may not even be enough. For Honnold, climbing is a sport, in which participants compete. But Leclerc sees it differently:

[H]e doesn’t care about accolades. He doesn’t even care if anybody ever knows what he’s climbing. . . . he cares about the experience in the mountains and the journey, and just wants to have a good time while he’s out there. And I really respect that.

For Leclerc, climbing is more like a spiritual practice. Only by placing oneself in the most dramatic natural settings in the world, with the highest possible stakes, after the most rigorous physical and mental training, can nirvana be achieved, however briefly. As Leclerc explains it,

When you’re in the mountains, with a mission, it’s like all of the superficialities of life just sort of evaporate, and you can often find yourself in a deeper state of mind . . . It’s kind of funny – the actual achievement doesn’t really change your life like you think it might when you’re building up to it. But what you’re left with is the journey that got you to that point. And if you have this big journey where you had to figure a lot of stuff out . . . and you were somewhere really beautiful for a long time, and then had to work really hard and overcome some kind of mental barrier, you’re left with so much more of a story or like a memory and an experience. And that’s what I find is the most important.

This is perhaps a more enlightened view than that of the past, when brute domination of nature was the aesthetic, if you could call it that. Early climbers like Sir Edmund Hillary employed the “expedition style”, or “siege tactics”, as detractors might refer to it, featuring teams of climbers, oxygen tanks, fixed ropes, and stocked camps, with ever-accessible food stores. In the 1960s, Messner and others pioneered the “alpine style”, which calls for a much more streamlined approach, out of respect for nature and climbing itself.

Those cautious lovers of nature, like me, might still ask: why climb a mountain? The answer is probably a bit of psychology and a bit of culture. A carefree child climbs a tree simply because it’s there. Apparently, the Sherpas didn’t summit Mount Everest until Tenzing Norgay accompanied Hillary to the top in 1953. This was not for lack of imagination on the Sherpas’ part, but because they were too busy eking out subsistence in an unforgiving Himalayan environment. They also happen to view Everest as the goddess mother of the world, and it’s common for the Sherpas to make a ritual offering to Chomolungma before attempting a climb (yes, Everest is the British name for the mountain). Today, climbing tourism is a vital source of revenue for economically-depressed communities in the Himalayas, and guiding is, if not a vocation, at least a relatively well-compensated occupation for locals. The picture of indigenous guides earning their bread by caddying tourists to the peak of their sacred mountain, recently renamed for a British man, is a contemporary example of the historically Western ethos of exploration, with the non-Western world (including its inhabitants) viewed as a commodity, of interest only to the extent that it’s been mapped, tamed, and tallied on a list of trophies. Climbing for many is a leisure activity, but for there to be leisure, there must be a leisure class.

Leclerc, with his goofy, Zen aura might offer a different way – a paradoxical combination of sweet humility and vaulting ambition. In Patagonia for an unprecedented winter attempt on the notorious Torre Egger, Leclerc looks like just another young hostel-hopper, horsing around with his host’s child and dog, playing guitar, and gamely trying to communicate in his broken Spanish. Yes, there’s still the superhuman drive to claim his place among the climbing gods. And that may well be a traditionally Western pursuit. But the tally being kept isn’t the most important thing for Leclerc.

All the same, it's one hell of a delicate dance. Free soloing represents a unique opportunity for Leclerc to find clarity, to test his talent, to commune with nature, and to achieve transcendence – all wonderful goals in principle, but overall, an elusive dragon to chase. And of course, a deadly one. From the outset of The Alpinist, we’re introduced to those before who paid the ultimate price for their passion. Later in the film, commentators worry that Leclerc is gambling too much. Says ice climber Will Gadd,

Marc-André’s playing with a pretty heavy deck right now. He’s walking relatively close to the edge in big environments, and I think he can do a fair amount of that and get away with it. But sooner or later, it’s gonna bite him.

The danger inherent to daredevil activities is that with each survived adventure, confidence grows. And more confidence leads to more audacity. It’s an unsustainable cycle, and even Honnold regards ice, in its deceptive dynamism, as a bridge too far. “It’s a very ephemeral medium”, as ice climber Raphael Slawinski puts it. There is a stomach-churning scene on The Stanley Headwall, in British Columbia, in which Leclerc eases himself up a sheet of ice that, to my nervous eye, appears to be shaking.

Eventually we’re introduced to Leclerc’s mother, a clear-eyed woman who seems somehow both in awe of, and unsurprised by, the phenomenon that is her son. There’s tension in each carefully-chosen word. I wonder, does Leclerc love the adventure more than he loves his mother, or his girlfriend? And how can it be fair to them, to run such risks? But maybe that’s not the right question. Maybe it’s not even a choice. In the end, you either feel alive or you don’t, and that’s everything.