This is either the blog of a madman or a genius
is it “philosophy” if it’s only hinted at in a blog?
In early March 2018, a few climbers disappeared in Alaska after summiting a previously unclimbed route. At the summit they had cell reception and they sent some photos from the snowy peak — and then they began their descent. In the pictures it looks like they were on a platform in the sky. They were going to ski out but they never made it to their skis. Probably, they were killed in an avalanche. All that was found was a red spot of rope. Their bodies were buried under too much snow to be recovered.
One of those men was named Ryan Johnson and the other was a 25-year-old named Marc-Andre Leclerc. A few years later, Leclerc was the subject of a documentary called The Alpinist by a guy named Peter Mortimer who does a lot of these climbing documentaries. You might have seen The Alpinist. It’s on Netflix. And if you haven’t seen it, here’s the trailer (which is a better summation that most trailers) —
In the film (and even in the trailer), Leclerc is almost unsettlingly authentic. All Mortimer has to do is point a camera at this young afro-headed Canadian with a lopsided smile and let him go. And, at the time this documentary was underway, Leclerc was probably the best alpine climber in the western hemisphere. He was climbing things that people had never climbed before. And he was climbing them solo — without any ropes between him and death.
Anyway, there’s this stretch of artistic footage in The Alpinist — Leclerc climbing, entirely alone, on a white face of mountain. Again — no ropes, just him and the wind. Snow falls away from his ice-axe and tumbles off into the colorless abyss. I mean, the scene is stunningly beautiful. It’s Leclerc’s solo of the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies — a route called The Emperor Face.
But the footage you see in The Alpinist is actually from the second time Leclerc soloed The Emperor Face. The first time he soloed the route (and he was the first person to ever solo the route), he did it quietly, after disappearing from Mortimer and his camera team. When they finally managed to get him on the phone and ask the climber why he accomplished this monumental feat without the documentary crew ostensibly following him around, Leclerc said “it wouldn’t be a solo to me if somebody was there.” He added that having a documentary crew on the mountain with him “just wouldn’t be remotely close to the adventure I was looking for.”
But of course — and you’ve probably already begun to suspect this — Leclerc kept a blog where he wrote about that first ascent. The unfilmed ascent. And while Marc-Andre Leclerc is occasionally awkward/uncomfortable on-camera in The Alpinist, he’s noticeably more comfortable writing about his experiences. You could argue that we get a truer sense of this kid through his blogs than through any of his interviews. Because so much of free-soloing and of Marc-Andre Leclerc particularly exists within the confines of the observer paradox — the notion that the phenomenon being observed is influenced by the presence of the observer — i.e. Leclerc telling his documentary crew that it’s only a solo to me if nobody else is there.
Leclerc’s blog reads like an adventure journal. The writing is mechanical and occasionally technical: he woke up because he sensed the predawn and then he made coffee and then he began toward the south glacier seracs. But occasionally, he slips in some authentic prose. After that first time he soloed The Emperor Face, he wrote — “the face was partially obscured in cloud and a huge lenticular cloud extended to the north off of the summit ridge. From the moraine far below I could hear the wind raging violently over the summit ridge more than two-thousand meters above and for the first time in a long time I felt deeply intimidated by the aura of the mountain."
There are several lines like that in his blogs. Passages when Leclerc accidentally catches the emotion he’s trying to put into writing. And as you read these old blogs you begin to feel that this writing meant something to Leclerc. He read widely and was introduced to alpinism through books. In a 2021 interview, Leclerc’s girlfriend told Climbing.com that “[Marc-Andre] read so much. Every book about alpine climbing. And others.” He knew the genre. His 4,800-word recording of The Emperor Face solo begins with his assertion that “one of the great contradictions of climbing writing is that the bigger and deeper the experience the more difficult they tend to be to write about.”
Now, Leclerc’s writing isn’t technically brilliant. He leans on adverbs and his pacing is arduously linear. But technically polished writing is often a substitute for authenticity. And while Leclerc puts his adventures across somewhat awkwardly, it’s full writing. It’s round, solid. Here, take these 2014 lines from an early-morning solo: “the climbing is generally easy but the swirling mist and fog adds character to the steep dark wall. I imagine falling off, flying through the dense mist unable to see the inevitable end far below, but I'm not going to fall and I smile as I race up to the summit ridge and check the time.”
And as you read Leclerc’s blog you begin to get a better feel of his underlying philosophy. But that philosophy is revealed only in pieces — he doesn’t beat you over the head with it. He elucidates only occasionally; like in this Muir-esque reflection from 2016:
“I’ve come to believe that the natural world is the greatest teacher of all, and that listening in silence to the universe around you is perhaps the most productive ways of learning. Perhaps it is not much of a surprise, but so often people are afraid of their own thoughts, resorting to drowning them out with constant noise and distraction. Is it a fear of learning who we actually are that causes this? Perhaps so many of us are afraid to confront our own personalities that we go on living in a world of falseness, filling the void of true contentment by being actors striving to be perceived by the world around us as something that we ‘supposed to be’ rather than living as who we are.”
But why am I telling you this? Marc-Andre Leclerc’s blog is not unknown. It’s on his Wikipedia page. I guess I’m telling you because, to me, 2022 can feel so monotonous. Sure, the world is ending but it’s ending with a whimper. Instagram is the only place you see people doing anything interesting. And the influencers aren’t living interesting lives as much as they’re just creating content. They’re not having adventures, they’re only staging them.1
And then here comes Leclerc — a kid who, only a few years ago, was living dangerously and deliberately and not for Instagram2 but just for the hell of it. He climbed mountains and he lived on a couch at the bottom of a stairwell. He vanished from the documentary crew following him around because having cameras on him just wouldn’t be remotely close to the adventure he was looking for. In our new era of competitive climbing (rock climbing is now in the Olympics), Leclerc wrote that “keeping time in order to set records is in fact reducing the adventure of alpinism.”
And yeah, I guess I’m telling you because, at the bottom of it, reading Marc-Andre Leclerc’s blog always cheers me up. It makes me happy to read him and know that, only a few years ago, there was a free-soloing nomad stomping around this world, having adventures and writing about them. And when there’s so much awful, fake shit on the internet, it’s nice to stumble across something real.
This idea, the idea of Leclerc’s lived philosophy makes me think of Kerouac declaring “the only ones for me are the mad ones” and how that was a cry for a lived philosophy in an world that felt stagnant. Now, I haven’t reread Kerouac but I have been thinking a lot about lived philosophies. About how if you read those German philosophers when you’re young enough, you might start to get pretty enthused by what they’re saying. I mean, when you’re in your early-twenties, you might start to get pretty idealistic when you read Nietzsche and find this whole philosophy around “living dangerously” and “sending your ships into uncharted seas” because soon enough in your life, “the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer.” But then you hit your late-twenties and you realize that Friedrich Nietzsche did very little living dangerously. Sure, he wrote some stuff challenging the ideas he was born into but instead of living dangerously, he mostly sat around in dusty universities and towns. Really, Nietzsche was just frequently sad. But Leclerc lived his philosophy. He didn’t put down any complex ideas about the nature of being. That passage of his philosophy that I block-quoted isn’t even particularly insightful. It’s the sort of musing you might get from any disaffected college freshman. But disaffected college freshmen believe in their ideas so tentatively that they rarely act upon them. Meanwhile, Leclerc lived in the deliberate pursuit of his philosophy — one for which he eventually died.
Marc-Andre Leclerc did have an Instagram but it doesn’t correspond with Influencer culture. Leclerc’s Instagram is mostly just breathtaking photos of mountains. These are pictures that were snapped on the fly, almost as an after-thought. Leclerc isn’t even in most of his Instagram photos, which is obviously anathema to the Instagram ideal.