Early in The Alpinist, the new movie by Sender Films, climber Marc-André Leclerc is captured free soloing the Stanley Headwall, a 500-foot feature in Canada’s Kootenay National Park heralded as the centerpiece of mixed climbing in the Rockies. Far below, a faint trench in the snow shows his path to the base of the route. Mixed climbing—using ice tools on rock as well as ice—can be insecure, and it’s a discipline of the sport practiced by just a small subset of climbers. Free-solo mixed climbing is performed by fewer still.��

After a minute or so, the voice-over drops out, and the ambient music disappears. Leclerc climbs, pausing occasionally to gently dust off the rock with his bare hands. You can hear the front points of his crampons digging into a hanging dagger of ice and the tip of his ice axes scraping against the limestone. The footage is astounding and lasts for nearly four minutes as Leclerc slowly makes his way past the cameraman.

Back at the parking lot, a voice off camera asks Leclerc how it went.

“It was super fun,” Leclerc says.

��ٳ�������?”

“No, not particularly.”

“Just another day out.”

“A really good day out,” Leclerc says. “Definitely a memorable day out.”

The Alpinist, which premieres in select cities September 7 and will be in theaters nationwide on September 10, is the fourth feature film from the Sender crew, based in Boulder, Colorado, which produced The Dawn Wall (2018), Valley Uprising (2014), and (2006). In 2015, directors Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen set out to make a profile of a young, unknown climber and introduce him to the world; the footage on the Stanley Headwall was shot the following year, when Leclerc was just 23 years old.�� The two filmmakers were attracted to Leclerc because he appeared to be, Rosen told me, “a perfect avatar of the cutting edge of this century-old tradition” of alpinism, a philosophy where style is king and the more minimal one can make a climb, the better. (“A rope, a rack, and the pack on your back,” alpinist Barry Blanchard says in the film. “That’s all you get.”) That ethos, which emerged as a counterweight to the bloated, siege tactics employed by climbers in the Himalayas in the early part of the 20th century, stretches from Walter Bonatti and Reinhold Messner to Blanchard and Ueli Steck. And it’s a risky one—many cutting-edge solo alpinists have died in the mountains. “For going on an adventure, you need difficulties, you need danger,” Messner tells us. “If death was not a possibility, coming out [of the mountains] would be nothing, it would be kindergarten. But not an adventure. And not an art.”

Leclerc was drawn to adventure, and he’s a mesmerizing character worthy of the profile treatment. Before the clothing company Arc’teryx signed him as a sponsored athlete, he worked construction to fund his forays into the high peaks. He lived for a time in the stairwell of a house in Squamish, British Columbia, before moving with his girlfriend, Brette Harrington, into a tent in the woods. He didn’t own a car and forewent a cell phone until Mortimer and Rosen bought him one so they could keep track of their elusive protagonist. The film chronicles what appears to be a playful game of cat and mouse between the directors and Leclerc, who didn’t seem to have much interest in being the subject of a documentary and certainly didn’t want cameramen around while he was soloing big mountains. (It serves as an interesting rebuttal to armchair critics, who like to claim that free soloists are doing it for the clout.)

Thankfully, Leclerc did let Rosen and Mortimer send his friend, photographer , with him on a trip to Patagonia, where he made the first winter ascent of��Torre Egger. Along with the footage from the Stanley Headwall, the Egger clips are the highlights of the production—wildly exposed soloing in some of the harshest conditions on earth.

Egger was supposed to be the thrilling climax to the film, akin to Alex Honnold’s climb of El Capitan’s Freerider��in the Oscar-winning Free Solo. Then, in 2018, when Rosen and Mortimer were in postproduction, Leclerc didn’t return from a trip to the Mendenhall Towers, a seven-peak granite massif outside Juneau, Alaska. After a six-day��search, rescuers determined that Leclerc and his partner on the climb, Ryan Johnson, died while descending an ice gulley off the formation. There is little footage from the tragedy or its aftermath in Juneau, though both Rosen and Mortimer immediately flew to the scene. “We didn’t want to shoot,” Rosen says. “We went up there to be supportive friends for Brette and the family. It was extremely stressful and raw.”

Few sports seem to kill their practitioners more than alpinism. The filmmakers don’t dig too deeply into this facet of their subject matter. Instead they keep the lens focused on their enigmatic character’s life, and what we can learn from it. And maybe they don’t need to zoom out beyond that. In the past few years, people within the close-knit community have become increasingly aware and vocal about the dangers of the sport. The burgeoning Climbing Grief Fund, which provides resources for climbers affected by the death of a partner or friend, and the work that has been spearheading with North Face athletes who have lost teammates in the mountains come to mind.

Like Free Solo and The Dawn Wall, The Alpinist was made for both core climbers and a more general audience. And it’ll likely succeed at thrilling the two camps of viewers. But those other films featured protagonists who are still alive. Leclerc’s death, then, only brings into focus the question always asked by non-climbers when confronted with something as ludicrous as free soloing an ice-covered 1,000-foot spire in the middle of winter: Why do it at all? In the film, Blanchard, wide-eyed, perhaps recalling his own rapturous days in the high country, provides at least one possible answer: “Moving over the mountain unencumbered is about as close as you’re going to get to sprouting wings and being totally free. Absolutely awake. Absolutely alive.”

After watching The Alpinist, it’s hard to argue that Leclerc would have disagreed.

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A few years ago, I went for a run with my girlfriend in the foothills outside our home in Santa Fe. It was early June, after work, and we planned to run for an hour or so, hoping to catch the evening light as the sun fell below the Jemez Mountains. We were going to take it easy. I was tapering for what would be my first 100-mile race a few weeks later. I had recently clocked my first 80- and 100-mile weeks after progressively building mileage over six months. I was 30 years old.

Before we’d made it a mile, a sharp pain radiated up from my foot. I stopped, expecting a cactus needle to be sticking out of my shoe. There was no needle. Dammit, I thought. I’ll jog it off. I hobbled on. No dice. I walked back to the car, waited a day, then a week. The pain didn’t go away. “Bone bruise,” the podiatrist said, jabbing my foot with a syringe full of cortisone. The day before the race, I jogged a mile around my neighborhood, just to test things out. Not great, but OK. I still ran the race. It wasn’t all that graceful, but I finished.

Four months later, a spry 31 and rebuilding for another event, I felt more sharp pains, this time in my knee. IT band syndrome. It seemed like it was time to take a break from running. I started climbing again, a sport I’d done for a decade that recently had taken a back seat to all that running. Within two or three months, I developed golfer’s elbow. I stopped climbing. Luckily, ski season was right around the corner. But soon a fall led to a separated AC joint in my shoulder. I went back to running. The pain in my knee returned, then migrated up my hamstring, where the tendons connect to the sit bone. Over to climbing I went. In no time, both of my shoulders were in agony—two strained biceps tendons. Dammit, I remember thinking. I was 33.

Before all this, my body had always done whatever I asked of it, like a new car fresh off the lot. Eighteen-hour days in Canada’s Purcell Mountains. Marathons on four weeks’ training. Seven hours of nonstop surfing in El Salvador. I pressed the gas pedal and the car accelerated. When I did occasionally get injured, there was nothing that a week on the couch—or a couple of extra beers—didn’t seem to fix. Youth, in other words, had not prepared me for getting older.

The hamstring injury was the most debilitating. I couldn’t sit for more than an hour without a dull pain pulsing through my leg, and it lingered for days. I went to an orthopedic doctor, who tugged on my leg for a few minutes, told me it was “a PT problem and not a doctor problem,” and charged me $200. I went to a PT. “Have you been stretching?” he asked. “No.” “Good! Don’t stretch. Can you walk up a flight of stairs?” “Yes.” “Wonderful. What about lifting a bag of groceries off the floor?” I started to get the feeling that his idea of “injured” was different than mine. Then I mentioned that, actually, I had been dealing with a raft of physical issues lately. “Is there some kind of overall bulletproofing routine I can do to, um, prevent all injuries in the future?” I asked, supposing that surely someone had solved this problem. He paused for a beat. “Have you tried googling it?”

This didn’t seem like particularly helpful advice, but I did as I was told. Turns out there’s a lot of information on the internet. Academic papers galore and lengthy case studies by Australian rugby trainers; YouTube videos by bodybuilders in aggressively tight shirts; British MMA fighters demoing mobility drills over soothing beats; skiers built like Gucci models executing gymnastic feats of strength; TB12, XPT, and other routines you should do Every Morning When You Wake Up! I tried them all. But the injuries didn’t go away, and more cropped up. A strained back, even something weird with my finger.

Eventually, I realized that I may just be feeling my age. Thirty-four, as of this writing. No shit, you may be thinking—athletes usually peak in their mid- to late twenties. But for me it came as a shock. (Where does the time go? etc.) It was also disastrous. No one expects to be, say, a soccer player into their sixties. But almost every runner or climber or skier I know has zero plans to dial back the days of deep powder, stacked granite pitches, or blissful singletrack. We are slaves to our passions. And so the injuries started to lead me down all sorts of scary existential alleyways: Who am I if I can’t do the things I love? It was extremely troubling to realize that what was once fresh off the lot was becoming a clunker—brake cables frayed, tires flat. I don’t think I met the criteria for full-blown depression, but I was very, very sad.

“The whole goal of adventure is seeing what new limits we can take ourselves to,” said , a nonsurgical ortho, in Missoula, Montana, who I reached out to in a desperate fugue after my girlfriend recommended him. It’s similar, he said, to what they’re doing in Nascar—pushing a car’s engineering to the absolute limit. “The difference,” Amrine said, “is that in the motorsports world, they love it when the machinery breaks. They spend all night reengineering it to work better. For us as athletes, when we break it’s a catastrophic end-all.” That’s it, I thought, no more sports for me. I guess I’ll take up day trading. But then he said something else: “And we don’t always want to do that tinkering and maintenance to get us better.”

Tinkering. Maintenance. These words were beacons of hope. In my case, tinkering involved a pretty straightforward prescription. “You need someone who will kick your ass,” Amrine said. He put me in touch with a PT he knew named Laura Opstedal, a woman who believes that even 90-year-olds should be deadlifting. Opstedal strapped me to a Humac Norm Isokinetic Dynamometer machine, which looks kind of like a dentist’s chair. Using a mechanized foot strap, she measured the relative strength of my hamstrings and quads. Then she put me on a treadmill, filmed me running, and sent the footage to a biomechanics lab. The results: my form was decent enough—no glaring deficiencies or giraffe-legged wobble—but my muscles weren’t nearly as robust as they should be.

“The demand you were putting on your body exceeded your capacity,” Opstedal explained, which was a nice way of saying You are not strong enough to do the things you are trying to do. When we exceed our capacity, we get injured, she explained. That initial injury becomes a never-ending cycle. You rest, you move less, your capacity shrinks more, you do your sport, you get hurt. Repeat. “Unknowingly,” Opstedal said, “you were caught in a downward spiral.”

To continue the tortured car metaphor: my engine was strong but the axles were rusted. I hadn’t developed a broad base of strength, and as I got older, heading out on a Saturday for a four-hour run or projecting a sport line at my limit wasn’t being supported mechanically by my nine-to-five desk job. I’m not unique in this regard. Opstedal sees athletes at her PT practice in Bozeman “all the time, all day long,” who are exactly the same. (I spoke with a half-dozen PTs for this story, and one of them, Michael Lau, cofounder of an online educational platform called the , described his typical client as “a 34-year-old male with a history of being athletic, knows a little about their body, but doesn’t have time to train the way they used to. Goes off very fine for the most part, but then stumbles into injury and can’t get over it.” It was comically on point.)

To pull myself out of the tailspin, I had to start from square one. I began with 15-minute runs that were so easy I felt silly putting on my running gear—Why not just knock this out in jeans?—and weights so light they were better suited to holding down sheets of paper. Exercises I hadn’t done since high school became routine: deadlifts, squats, presses. “In health care,” Lau told me, “the problems are complex, but the answers are often simple.” Slowly—painfully slowly—I added a little bit more week by week. But I kept at it. (Consistency was key: back when I tried treating myself with YouTube videos, I never knew whether I was on the right track; I would experiment with an exercise for a day or a week, then abandon it when I didn’t see immediate results. Not a good tactic.)

I’d like to be able to report that Opstedal kicked my ass so thoroughly that I now have an entirely rebuilt suspension, ready for the next 100,000 miles. The truth is, my body’s a work in progress. I will probably be doing some version of the clamshell for the rest of my life—nothing works perfectly forever if you ignore it.

The good news, though, came from Lau. “There’s nothing preventing you from getting back to where you were,” he told me. Amrine backed that up. “If you train your body, and do the appropriate things for your age,” he said, “you can actually make even a 60-year-old human machine work very, very well.” Which means I have another 25 years to figure it out.

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In late 2019, John John Florence had a decision to make. He was just four months removed from reconstructive surgery for a torn ACL that forced him to miss several events on the World Surf League tour. A third world title was out of the question for the 27-year-old from Oahu, but with a single event re­maining—the Billabong Pipe Masters—Florence was still in the running for one of two spots on the first-ever Olympic surf team. “I was getting a little nervous,” he says. “Like, This is gonna be close. I think I might have to do Pipe.”

It can take about a year to recover from ACL surgery. And only two weeks before the contest, Florence hadn’t been on a shortboard since the injury, which he suffered while competing in Brazil. So he adjusted his mindset. “I just looked at it like, if I don’t qualify for the Olympics, then I have two months off to go and do something else,” he says. “I tried to see it in a positive way.” The waves weren’t ideal, but he remembers thinking, “ ‘Maybe I’ll paddle out for this heat, and if I see a wave I like, I’ll go on it.’ I just went like that through the event: ‘OK, this wave looks pretty good, I’m gonna go.’ ”

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At Trimcraft Surfboards, expert builders Ryan Lovelace, Gerry Lopez, Rich Pavel, and Davey Smith dream up the designs, and a cadre of experienced shapers bring them to life. The business model lowers the price without sac­rificing boutique quality.��

Trimcraft Burner Shortboard ($835)

Lovelace, who created the Burner, describes it as “a shortboard for surfers who don’t shortboard.” But don’t mistake it for a beginners-only model. He initially designed it as an all-around travel sled that does equally well hunting tubes in Indonesia, carving European beach breaks, and groveling through sessions when the swell hasn’t quite arrived yet. A wide point under your chest and ­relaxed rocker make for easy paddling and early entry into waves compared with most boards in the six-foot range. It’s responsive and user-­friendly, as long as you’re in the mood for flowy S-turns, not vertical, off-the-lip bashes.

We tested a 6'8″ board with a ­two-plus-one fin setup (length is custom, and you can order the Burner as a quad, twin, or single fin) and had a blast at waist-high point breaks and shifty Northern California reefs. Going smaller would deliver a ride more akin to a traditional (if old-school) shortboard. For advanced surfers, it worked equally well in large and cruisey waves. And while it’s ­certainly a pricier option than buying off the rack, the Burner’s quality and versatility make it more than worth the investment.

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On Thursday, a Nepalese government official told the�� that all spring Mount Everest expeditions have been canceled due to coronavirus concerns. The official spoke with the Post on the condition of anonymity but on Friday, a notice��from Nepal’s Department of Immigration confirmed the rumor.

“Considering the declaration of [the] World Health Organization regarding the scale of COVID-19��spread,” the notice reads, “all the permits for mountaineering expeditions issued, and to be issued for spring 2020 season are suspended.”��

Nepal is also suspending all on-arrival tourist visas through the end of April.��

“This is disappointing news for both our expedition leaders and our clients who have trained for months for this year’s climb,” Lukas Furtenbach, founder of Furtenbach �����ԹϺ���s, said in a release. “We continue to emphasize safety and wellbeing above all…so we understand the dire consequences a COVID-19 outbreak at Base Camp would have. Sadly, we have to agree that this is a responsible call to make right now.”

Gordan Janow, director of programs at Alpine Ascents International, said that they’d already moved their trekking trips to the fall and next spring. Their Everest trip was set to run with three guides and six clients.

Mount Everest sits on the border between Nepal and China.��On Wednesday��the Chinese government announced that no expeditions would be allowed to run on the northern, Tibet side of the 29,029-foot mountain.��

This will be the quietest year on Everest since 2015, when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the region on April 25, just as climbers were settling in to Base Camp. That year was the first since 1974 without a single summit during the spring season.

Nepal’s economy relies heavily on the tourism industry,��. Everest permits earn the government around $4 million each year. A single two-month season on the world’s highest peak can earn a Sherpa up to seven times the country’s average annual salary of $700.��

“This is a big deal, it’s devastating to the industry,” said Adrian Ballinger of Alpenglow Expeditions, who already canceled his Everest expedition after China put an end to the spring season on the north side of the mountain. “The money that comes in not just from the climbers, but from the trekkers who go during the Everest season supports the entire year for every family I know in the Khumbu and many people in Kathmandu. The loss of that income is going to be really, really difficult for the locals here.”

Ballinger and his team are trying to figure out what partial wages they can offer the 23 Sherpa staff they were set to employ this season. “Of course I would like to give 100 percent of what the clients paid back,” said Ballinger. “But when canceling two weeks, or 30 days before a trip, that’s not the right call. We have to share in this pain.”

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Humans are, for the most part, bilaterally symmetrical. Our right side looks like our left side and vice versa. Same goes for surfboards. Trouble is, a frontside turn looks dramatically different from a backside turn, and it’s almost never the case that a board travels in a perfectly straight line, with water running uniformly underneath. So it’s a little strange that, although none of us surf symmetrically, 99 percent of surfboards are designed as if we do.

Enter the asymmetrical surfboard. Though the provenance is murky, it likely first appeared in the late fifties or early sixties. For years the boards were a fringe concept, but recently they’ve enjoyed a bit of a resurgence, thanks to talented young surfers like San Diego’s Ryan Burch.

Album Disasym ($650 and up)

The Album Disasym—designed by San Clemente, California, shaper Matt Parker—has a longer rail paired with a twin fin on the toe side and a shorter rail matched with a quad set on the heel side. (It’s available in regular and goofy-foot versions.) The result is a blazing performance board that doesn’t skitter out through turns. And don’t assume it was designed to go only one way. The shorter rail line allows for quick and snappy backside turns. Ride it a few inches shorter and a little narrower than your standard shortboard—the Disasym generates speed on its own and doesn’t need a ton of planing area.

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In 2016, Lance Armstrong launched the endurance-sports brand WEDU.��It was an earnest rebranding effort for the fallen cyclist.��“Who believes that the most meaningful revelations emerge at the far edge of your limits?”��read the company's About page. “We do.”

Beyond that, the site didn't offer any specifics, seeming only to position WEDU��as the umbrella brand for��Armstrong's two podcasts, “The Move,” (formerly “Stages”)��where he provides��in-depth analysis on cycling and triathlon races, and “The Forward,” where he conducts long-form interviews with an eclectic list of creatives and businesspeople.��Scrolling��farther down the WEDU��site was surprisingly unhelpful for anyone looking for details on Armstrong's next venture: “WEDU��is a mindset rooted in the belief that every challenge ignites a spark of growth and change.”��

On Thursday, the brand finally debuted��a��, this time��featuring original editorial��content, both of Armstrong's podcasts, and a $60-per-year membership program called Season Pass, which will give buyers��live access to the podcasts, exclusive stories, and handpicked-by-Armstrong members-only gear. The stories range from training tips from world champion Ironman Craig Alexander to a short listicle of “Five Totally Badass Women.”��

Armstrong has shown a knack for clever branding with his��other business ventures. In Austin, Texas, he already owns a coffee shop��called ��(a witty nod to his battle with testicular cancer) and a bike shop called ��(a play on the French term for the Tour de France's famous��yellow jersey). WEDU��lacks that��whimsy, perhaps because it's aimed at the core endurance��crowd. With this project,��Armstrong is hoping��to reach and influence fans far beyond his Texas base.��

“The goal is to build and foster community around a shared passion for endurance sports and the endurance lifestyle,”��says editorial director��Julia Polloreno, former editor-in-chief of Triathlete. Whether there's a large community ready to subscribe remains��to be seen. For now, the WEDU relaunch provides��a��first glimpse at��Armstrong's second act, something both fans and haters��have been eagerly anticipating ever since the famed cyclist finally settled the federal whistleblower lawsuit in May.

��

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In the summer of 2016, I was researching the northwest face of the Devil’s Thumb, an infamous peak in southeast Alaska chronicled in , by Jon Krakauer. As a young writer, Krakauer��had himself climbed the east ridge, but as I soon learned, no one had ever ascended via the 6,500-foot northwest face. It was one of alpinism’s last great prizes. In 2003, Guy Edwards and John Millar, two top-tier Canadian climbers, had disappeared on that face��during a week of bad weather and frequent avalanches. After a six-day��search, Alaska state troopers��gave up looking. No one had attempted the line since.

I called Colin Haley, a Seattle-based alpinist who has climbed extensively in Alaska, to ask if he knew of anyone thinking about a push on the massive and dangerous face. He didn’t, but he told me that if I was��searching for a story, I should look into��a young man from British Columbia named Marc-André��Leclerc. “He’s one of the best all-around climbers I know,” Haley told me. I called Leclerc.

On the phone, the 23-year-old was soft-spoken and articulate, and he laughed at himself when he slipped into Canadianisms like “eh.” He explained that he’d gotten into climbing after reading a book his mother gave him when he was eight years old, how he’d learned at a gym near Vancouver but had always been more interested in big mountains. “I told the grownups that I wanted to go to the Himalayas,” he said, “and they told me that it was too dangerous. In North America, people like to push the difficulty of climbing without pushing the risk. The danger aspect of going into the mountains is discouraged.”

Two days after our conversation, Leclerc left for Patagonia. Over the next few months, we spoke intermittently by e-mail and made plans to meet in December. Eventually, I learned that Guy Edwards, who’d cut his teeth climbing near Leclerc’s home before disappearing in Alaska, was one of the young Canadian’s heroes. What I couldn’t have known��was that before long, on a��peak not far from the one that had taken Edwards’s life,��Leclerc��would succumb to a similar fate.

Like many couples in their twenties, Leclerc and his girlfriend,��Brette Harrington, had a tough time saying goodbye. But on the morning of Saturday, March 3, 2018, it proved easier than usual.

The week before, the pair had made a first ascent of a peak called Station D, 42 miles��from their home in Agassiz, in southwestern B.C. Temperatures dipped to minus four degrees, and Leclerc let Harrington, a petite blonde with bright blue eyes and nerves of steel, lead every pitch so she could stay warm. At night��he heated her feet on his stomach. Still, when they returned from the climb after four cold days in the mountains, Harrington was ready for��warmer weather. She headed to Tasmania to climb on Tasman Island for two weeks with friends.

Leclerc had a few options to pass the time while she was gone. He’d been thinking of soloing Mount Waddington, at 13,186 feet the highest peak in Canada’s Coast Mountains, but the conditions weren’t lining up. The weather around Juneau was looking good, though. And he remembered an invitation he’d received a few months earlier from a 34-year-old climber named Ryan Johnson.

Johnson, a Juneau local, was an Alaskan climber through and through. He claimed that he could feel the difference between 80- and 100-mile-per-hour winds. He once described himself as having “biceps like a seventh-grade member of the debate team and calves like bull testicles,” but��as a gold and silver miner in southeast Alaska,��he��developed a reputation as��a��little guy who could outwork��the big guys.

Johnson had��obsessed over the north face of the Main Mendenhall Tower for years. The lies ten miles north of Juneau. Over the years, Johnson had put up countless routes on all the towers. But the proudest and most obvious line was the unclimbed��2,500-foot north face. He’d attempted it once, in 2015, but turned back when the ice got thin halfway up.��The route, Johnson explained��when he��contacted Leclerc about climbing it together, wasn’t technically difficult, but it was extremely challenging to protect against a fall—even a small��slip could be fatal. The granite would be heavily rimed, like climbing Styrofoam, and��though they’d be roped up, they’d need to climb as if they were soloing the face. It sounded right up Leclerc’s alley.

By the time Johnson reached out to him, Leclerc was no longer just a promising young climber; he was being lauded as the leader of a new generation of alpinists. In 2015, he made his second trip to Patagonia and soloed the Corkscrew linkup on Cerro Torre. The 4,000-foot route features exposed ice and rock climbing and was the hardest line anyone had ever soloed in the region. Leclerc was just 22 years old. In September 2016, he went back and soloed Cerro Torre’s neighbor, Torre Egger. The line he chose, on the East Pillar, was even harder than the Corkscrew. “Want the definition of badass?” wrote Rolando Garibotti, Patagonia’s most respected climber and its de facto record keeper for accomplishments in the southern Andes. “There you have it.”

No one had soloed Egger in winter, but Leclerc, it seemed, had the ideal skill set for the job. As Katie Ives, editor of Alpinist, told me last year��when I spoke��to her for a profile of��Leclerc��I was working on, “He’s bringing the kinds of technical abilities that we used to associate with sport climbing to places where they’re also dealing with altitude, rime, ice, bad weather, and wet rock. He’s putting all the pieces together.”

Climbing ran a profile of Leclerc in September 2017, titled “.” Sender Films, the production company behind��Valley Uprising,��began filming with��him. But even as the media came calling, Leclerc didn’t seem to care. When a film company requested some B-roll of him ambling around Squamish, B.C., he bashfully��avoided the town’s main drag, not wanting to attract��attention. I spent a week with him in December 2016, while he was living in his mother’s attic an hour east of Vancouver, and he seemed more excited to have me around as a belayer than by the prospect of media coverage. He simply loved to climb. Which explains why, when a climber he’d never heard of contacted him about tackling an obscure Alaskan��peak, he jumped at the chance.

The night before Harrington and Leclerc��parted ways for their separate��climbs, Harrington wrote Leclerc a long letter about how sad it was to say goodbye. “But I know you’re gonna have an amazing time in Alaska,” she wrote in loopy green letters. “I can’t wait to see you again and we can climb together all spring!��Good luck and be safe.”

She never gave it to him. It was 4 a.m. when Harrington��dropped Leclerc at the airport in Vancouver for his flight to Juneau. She hugged him and he was gone.

At 7 a.m. on Sunday, March 4, a chopper chartered from a Juneau outfit called Coastal Helicopters touched down on the Mendenhall Glacier, north of the towers. The sun had just come up, and the weather was��clear. The��forecast called for a high-pressure system to move through the area for at least three days, and the snowpack seemed stable.

The 2,500-foot north face of the��Main Tower is taller than Yosemite’s Half Dome. Even for Alaska—where everything is big—the face is enormous. In late winter��it never sees the sun. The��wall terminates at a series of crevasses that litter a 55-degree snowfield for a few hundred feet before��aproning out into a flat expanse on the glacier. If a rock fell from the ridge, it would plummet a couple thousand feet before bouncing down the snowy run-out and coming to rest a quarter-mile from where it first landed. That’s the approximate spot Leclerc and Johnson cached all the gear they wouldn’t need until the following day, when they’d ski ten miles out the West Mendenhall Glacier Trail back to Juneau. They planned to return by Wednesday evening at the latest.

They didn’t have much gear to cache. Both climbers were fanatical about moving fast and light over unknown terrain. On one of Leclerc’s monthlong solo trips to Patagonia, he brought just five carabiners and two ice screws—less gear than most climbers take��for a day at the crag.

Leclerc and Johnson��stuck their skis and an avalanche probe in the snow and attached a reflective vest to the probe so they could see it from high up the face. Then they racked up and trudged��toward the black granite face.

The climbing wasn’t nearly as hard as some of the routes the men��had completed in the past. They probably didn’t talk much. When you’ve got a good partner for an alpine climb, there isn’t a lot to say. There are fleeting moments when both would’ve been at a belay stance, but even then it’s a quick changeover of gear, maybe a couple of words about the��line, then back to the business of putting one ice tool in front of the other.

The sun set at 5:35, and Leclerc and Johnson bivied on the face, probably snacking on trail mix and using a small stove to melt snow to drink. They’d have started climbing again by first light.

Just before 10:30 a.m.��on Monday March 5, Leclerc texted Harrington, who was still in Tasmania: “Love, I’m at the summit! It was an incredible climb.” He sent her a few photos and posted to Instagram. “Rare live update here,” he wrote, accompanying a photo looking west. “That is Mt Fairweather in the distance.” Then he texted his mom an image of the surrounding peaks. “Beautiful,” she responded. “Where are you?”

Meanwhile, Johnson took a video for his girlfriend, spinning in a circle to show her a cloudless view that stretched a hundred miles.

Marc-André��Leclerc was born on Vancouver Island��but largely raised in Agassiz, a small agriculture town in the Fraser Valley. It’s conservative and religious, though Leclerc was neither. It’s the kind of place, he said, where people “get a farm, get their blessings from the Lord, and have a bunch of kids to help out.”

The family didn’t have much money. His father, Serge, worked construction. His mother, Michelle, stayed home with Leclerc, his younger brother, and their elder sister, before taking a job at a restaurant��to help make ends meet.

The region is not known for alpinism��or climbing of any sort. If anything, it’s notable for producing exceptional corn. But as a four-year-old, Marc-André��knew the height of Mount Everest to the foot and could recite the exploits of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay the way some kids reel off dinosaur names. His mind moved at hyperspeed. He would draw diagrams for his mom of ionic bonding; as an eight-year-old he tossed and turned in bed, thinking about the scientific principle of entropy. Climbing was the only time his brain could relax. He learned, like many kids his age, at a local gym. But it was the mountains he wanted. Despite winning competitions against boys three years his senior, he asked his mom to pull him from the climbing team.

At 14, he started working construction with his father. It was hard, but he liked it. He saved his money and bought some second-hand ice-climbing tools, a rope, and a set of steel pitons that he learned to use from an old army survival manual. The gear would have been state-of-the-art had he gotten it��60 years earlier. “It wasn’t like I said. ‘Oh, I want to get into climbing,’ and then my parents bought me a ten-day course with guides and a bunch of new gear,” Leclerc told me with just a touch of pride in his voice. “I had to save up my pennies and buy shitty ice axes.”

A middle-aged land surveyor taught him to ice-climb when he was in high school, and he topped out his first multi-pitch route with a German man who was in his seventies. To get to trailheads, Leclerc would hitchhike, take the bus, or have his parents or his sister drop him off. He did most of his climbing alone, slowly developing his technique on��rock and ice. He practiced building anchors in his room and scaled telephone poles with his ice tools. He became one of the best climbers of his generation largely by reading books and doggedly figuring things out on his own.

Leclerc finished high school a year early, spent a summer hanging drywall, and then moved two hours northwest to Squamish, where he met Harrington. If there was one thing he loved more than climbing, it was Harrington—“the cute one,” as he referred to her. You could barely talk to him without a digression to what incredible thing Harrington was doing at the moment. “Isn’t she amazing?” he’d say to anyone who’d listen.

The two met when she was 20 and he was 19. She was in college in nearby Vancouver, and he was living in a friend’s stairwell for $180 month. All either of them wanted to do was climb. They started tying in together and soon were dating. Leclerc loved being in the mountains. Even more, he loved being in the mountains with Harrington. They traveled to Baffin Island, Yosemite, and Patagonia, getting better and better. When he soloed the Corkscrew, she was soloing Chiaro di Luna, a 2,500-foot climb on the opposite side of the valley. That night at base camp, as a storm raged around them, they sang in their tent, celebrating together.

Leclerc always called Harrington when he was out of the mountains to let her know he was OK. When Wednesday rolled around and he hadn’t contacted her,��she texted him: “I hope your��making it back okay. It’s been awhile since your summit message.” She didn’t get a response, so she called Juneau Mountain Rescue to check in.

Juneau, a town of 32,000, isn’t considered��a climbing destination. The community of climbers there is small. Many on JMR knew Johnson personally; some had teamed up with him to climb. Three years earlier, Johnson, though not a member of the��crew, had saved the lives of four��JMR members who’d been pinned down on a ridge by a storm.

It was Wednesday morning, March 7, when they got Harrington’s call. One of JMR’s members had talked to Johnson before he left for the towers and reported that the men weren’t due back to town until later that evening.

Maybe I jumped the gun on this one,��Harrington thought. She played out the possible scenarios in her mind. If search and rescue deployed the next day and didn’t find Leclerc’s skis, it meant that the men were somewhere on the glacier and headed back. If they found their skis at the base of the climb, it meant that for some reason they were still in the mountains, unable to call for help or get themselves out. And that meant she was flying to Alaska.

The next day, Harrington’s phone rang. It was Gabe Hayden from JMR.

“Brette,” Hayden said, “we found their skis.” Hayden was a frequent partner of Johnson’s. They’d climbed the south buttress of the Main Tower in 2011 and the south face of the West Tower in 2013. Hayden told Harrington that a Sitka-based Coast Guard helicopter had flown out to the towers and scanned the north face and surrounding glacier with an infrared camera, trying to pick up any signs of body heat. The search turned up empty; there were no bodies. The assumption was that Leclerc and Johnson had descended the line they climbed up and been swept from the face by an avalanche.

It sounded to Harrington like that was it; that they were calling off the search. No, no, no,��she thought. We can’t��call the search off after one day. This is not OK.��She booked a flight and started planning her own operation. She made lists of the gear they’d need and locations to search.

In fact, the search��hadn’t been called off, but by the time Harrington landed in Juneau on Saturday, March 10, it was on hold. The day before, a Coast Guard helicopter had made it��only as far as the south branch of the glacier before the weather moved in. Visibility was too low and the winds too high to get a helicopter safely out to the towers. Instead, from their base at the Alaska National Guard hangar at Juneau International Airport, JMR began assembling a timeline through the text messages the men had sent from the summit.

By this point, a small cadre of Leclerc’s��and Johnson’s friends, family, and climbing partners had assembled in Juneau: Leclerc’s parents and sister, Bridgid-Anne; his Squamish climbing buddies Will Stanhope, Paul McSorley, and Kieran Brownie; Nick Rosen and Pete Mortimer of Sender Films; Justin Sweeny, the athlete manager at Arc’teryx, Leclerc’s sponsor; and Clint Helander and Samuel Johnson, climbing partners of Ryan Johnson’s.

Leclerc’s summit text to Harrington was sent at 10:26 a.m. His final text to his mom was sent more than an hour later. It was unlikely that the men spent that much time on the summit, and had they descended the same way they climbed up, they would have lost service immediately. They must have gone another way.

More than the breathtaking difficulty and audacity of Leclerc’s climbs, it was his approach to climbing that set him apart. He was, technically and athletically, on the same level as someone like Alex Honnold. Yet he largely flew under the radar. He preferred it that way.

“On the one hand, you have someone who is really on the cutting edge of modern alpinism,” said �����辱�Ծ�����’s Katie Ives. “On the other hand, he’s working within a philosophical mindset that’s very old-fashioned.”

The trip reports that Leclerc wrote on his blog are peppered with icy summit bivouacs and other sketchy moments, but he always seems, in his own words,��“deeply happy and in an incredible state of mind.” At one point, he writes, “I was being drawn toward the mountain in a search for adventure, by a desire to explore my own limitations and to also be immersed in a world so deeply beautiful that it would forever etch itself into my memory.”

He idolized men like Guy Edwards and Walter Bonatti, archetypes of a bygone era of exploration. “Old-school climbers are renowned for their toughness,” he told me wistfully as we elbowed up to the bar in a log-cabin pub near Agassiz. “You read about Bonatti soloing the Bonatti Pillar. He got soaked in the rain, froze, spilled gas in his food, smashed his finger with a hammer and cut the end off, and he still finished the route. You don’t really hear about people doing stuff like that these days.”

But that’s the life Leclerc wanted to live. “He’s on a personal quest,” said climber Steve House. “His art is alpinism.”

While making the first solo ascent of the Emperor Face of Canada’s Mount Robson��in April 2016, Leclerc bivied at��the summit, hoping to wait out the night for better descent conditions. While heating water, it boiled over and soaked his clothes. Then the batteries in his headlamp died. Then he dropped his lighter, leaving him without any more water and rendering his stove—and his freeze-dried food supply—useless. Alone and freezing in the dark on the Canadian Rockies’��highest peak, Leclerc took it all in stride. “Despite the discomfort,” he��later wrote, “it was undeniable that the situation was quite stupendous.” He eventually stumbled his way back down the peak to the trailhead.

“Some people seem to want it a little too much,” said��Honnold, who crossed paths with Leclerc a few times in Patagonia. “You’re just not sure if the motivation is pure for why they want to be good at something. Marc doesn’t seem to want it at all. He just does it. He doesn’t want any of the accolades or anything, he just wants to have an experience in the mountains.”

After Leclerc made his ascent of the Emperor Face,��:

It was now my fourth day alone in the mountains and my thoughts had reached a depth and clarity that I had never before experienced. The magic was real. … Through time spent in the mountains, away from the crowds, away from the stopwatch and the grades and all the lists of records I’ve been slowly able to pick apart what is important to me and discard things that are not.

The last time I saw him, I asked Leclerc what those things were. “It’s important to appreciate the place��you’re in,” he said, “and to have a memorable experience, something that sticks with you for a long time. When I’m old, I want to have all these adventures in my memory.”

By the evening of Saturday, March 10, the possibility that Johnson and Leclerc were still alive, stuck in a crevasse somewhere that hadn’t been searched yet, brought a small glimmer of hope and a whirlwind of activity to the rescue operation. But the helicopters were still grounded.

The hurry-up-and-wait nature of the search left the climbers’ friends and family in an odd, liminal space. There was a lot of urgency��but not much to do about it.

“Marc-André��would love it here,” his sister, Bridgid, kept saying. Everywhere that Harrington, Michelle, and Bridgid went, people knew who they were. They weren’t allowed to pick up tabs for meals or drinks. A waitress baked them scones at her house. Harrington played videos on her phone of Marc-André��singing and dancing. They learned about Johnson, too: that he had an enthusiasm for climbing that he could never quite contain, which sounded a lot like Leclerc to the three women. It was clear that the two climbers must have hit it off immediately.

As a twentysomething��young man, Johnson had a wild streak, chain-smoking cigarettes in his tent. But��in 2015,��he had a son, Milo. Johnson settled down. He opened a CrossFit-style gym in Juneau. Becoming a father, he told his parents, “lived up to the hype.”

On Tuesday March 13, the sky went blue. It had snowed more than four feet in the six days since Leclerc and Johnson were reported missing. With help from the Alaska National Guard, JMR took a Blackhawk helicopter out to the towers. While buzzing the summit, they spotted the nearly filled-in divots of two sets of footprints traversing the ridge heading east. The footprints ended at the top of a gully where a line of cool blue ice dropped roughly 1,000 feet from the ridge all the way to the bergschrund, a large crevasse near the base of the wall formed by the glacier retreating from the face. A small piece of black and white cordelette dangled at the top.

The SAR team headed back to base and switched to an AStar helicopter. Smaller and more nimble than a��Blackhawk, the AStar would allow them to get in closer to the gully. It was also equipped with a Recco��detector, which uses radar to pick up metal or electronics.

In a separate helicopter, Harrington and Samuel Johnson monitored the AStar’s progress with Emily Nauman, a member of JMR. They flew in close to the north face. Ribbons of ice coated a series of steep headwalls. Above that, snow ramps led to ridges and then the summit. A cornice��hung along the ridge leading to the gulley. At the bergschrund, part of an orange rope was visible. The AStar hovered over it for a long time.

They’re there,��Harrington thought. They’re right there.

She felt close, like she could reach them. Hiking in��to check��if Leclerc and Johnson were there and still alive wasn’t an option. The hazard was just too great. Somehow she knew Leclerc was gone.

“Will you fly to the summit with me?” she asked, turning around in her seat to face Samuel. “We can��rappel their descent line��and find them.” It was a��risky proposition. But Samuel agreed.

The��helicopter turned and flew back to town to get the gear they’d need. When they arrived, JMR members showed them close-up photos of the men’s gear taken from the AStar. An orange climbing rope was partially visible in the snow. According to the Recco search, the men were buried 15 feet below. A dangerous rappel wouldn’t be necessary.

“Due to the circumstances,” read a dispatch by the Alaska State Troopers later that day, “Johnson and Leclerc are presumed deceased.”

Dying on rappel is common. Two climbers perishing at once on rappel is extremely��rare. There is a chance that one of the men made a mistake while building the anchor, or that they neglected to put stopper knots at the tail ends of their rope. Everyone makes mistakes. But those who knew Leclerc and Johnson best consider the likelihood��of any of those explanations vanishingly small. The two climbers were��too methodical and careful.

Of course, care doesn’t always protect you in the mountains. Something could have fallen��on them��and severed the anchor holding them to the wall. It could have been a��large chunk of ice or rock. A cornice could have ripped off. An avalanche could have swept down the gully.��All three��events can be triggered by a single person, by changes in temperature, or by nothing at all.

Leclerc and Johnson probably made about five rappels before they reached the bergschrund. They wouldn’t have had much time to react. They would have braced themselves against the bergschrund, hoping that by some miracle��whatever it was that fell��from the sky missed them. Instead, it tore them from the wall. They were less than half a mile from their skis.

In the days after the search was called off, Harrington returned to the Mendenhall Towers. She walked at the base of the cliffs, a safe distance from the runout zone. The snow was warm and wet, and it crunched under her feet. She had so many things she wanted to tell Leclerc.

She stood still and listened to the towers. Listened for cornices falling. Listened for avalanches. Listened for rockfall. She heard only the perfect stillness of winter. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.

The post The Last Days of Marc-André Leclerc appeared first on �����ԹϺ��� Online.

After three weeks of practice runs, two broken records, and one hundred-foot fall, Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold became the first people to climb the Nose route on Yosemite’s El Capitan in under two hours. On Wednesday morning, they topped out��the 3,000-foot hunk of granite in 1 hour, 58 minutes, and 7 seconds after they left the valley floor.��

It’s hard to overstate just how ridiculously fast that is. They averaged a time of 3 minutes and 48 seconds over each of the 31 pitches, moving at a rate of more than 25 feet per minute. For context, most parties take around three days to climb the route.��

Last October, when Brad Gobright and Jim Reynolds knocked the record down to��2:19:44—shaving��four minutes off the then-fastest time held by Honnold and Hans Florine—it felt like they might remain on top of the record books for at least a little while. Turns out, they were only on top for a single winter. Last Wednesday, Honnold and Caldwell knocked the time down to��2:10:15. “From the get go, we’ve been talking about sub-two,” Honnold told �����ԹϺ��� shortly after that record. “I think we can. We’re going to keep trying a bit.”

On Monday, they climbed the route in��2:01:53, despite a stuck rope near the top that cost them at least two minutes. “We’re both adapting to the level of effort,” Honnold said. “We've been climbing the Nose four days a week for three weeks. This climb felt more casual than our��2:10��climb.”��

If you were following their progress, sub two hours started to feel inevitable, even to the two climbers.��“That’s totally how it felt,” Honnold��said this morning.��“Each time we were improving a bit.��Today honestly wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough, so we’re psyched.”��

For his part, Caldwell was worried that he wouldn't��be able to keep up��with Honnold. “I’m getting kind of old,” he said.��“But Alex has a way of whipping me into shape.”

Honnold��feels that the true human potential on the route is closer to 1:30 or 1:15, though they won’t be trying again any time soon. “We’re totally over it,” Honnold said.��“Not trying again.”

“We definitely did it way safer than we could have and it felt very reasonable the whole time,” Caldwell said. “But it’s��been stressful for��our��family and friends.”

Will Gobright and Reynolds take another shot? “I’m inspired and relieved they got their sub-two-hour time today,” Gobright said.��“It’s the proudest speed climbing ascent to have happened in the history of U.S rock climbing. I’m proud Jim Reynolds and I held the record for a bit of time but in all honesty our time is no where close to their time. The level of talent and confidence required to climb El Cap that fast is hard for me to grasp. Part of me would be excited to see someone try to break it but deep down I hope no one tries. At least not in my lifetime.”

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Five days ago, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell shattered the speed record on the Nose route on El Capitan in Yosemite, climbing the line in 2 hours, 10 minutes, 15 seconds. But they had a few tangled ropes and a couple mishaps, which forced a bit of down climbing and wasted valuable seconds. They wanted to go faster.��

“From the get-go, we've been talking about sub two,”��Honnold said after the climb. “I think we can. We're going to keep trying a bit.”

This morning, they inched ever closer to the sub-two mark, setting a new record on the nearly 3,000 foot route: 2 hours, 1 minute, 53 seconds.��

“A lot of it is familiarity with the route,”��Honnold says. “Even though it doesn’t feel like we’re moving faster, we are. Every time we do a lap we’re a little smoother. We’re adapting to a new level of effort.”

But they still weren’t perfect. Just six pitches from the summit, their rope got stuck. Caldwell had to rappel down and shake it loose, while Honnold sat and waited. “It cost us at least two minutes,” Honnold says, “and ultimately the two-hour mark.’

It’s been a weekend of highs and lows in Yosemite Valley.��On Saturday, two experienced climbers fell to their deaths from the Salathé��Wall.����

Honnold and Caldwell climbed the Nose yesterday, intentionally moving at a more casual pace to get a feel for how the deaths affected their headspace. “I didn't know them personally,”��Honnold says. “But it is sobering. What we’re doing is a little bit different, but it’s using the same strategy and the same tactics. It’s definitely on the same spectrum.”

Honnold said he and Tommy will continue to try to chip time off the record in the coming weeks.��

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