Marc Andre Leclerc And Ryan Johnson

Avalanche dangers have hindered any recovery, according to an Arc’teryx Equipment statement. In a remembrance on Gripped.com, Brandon Pullan relates a story that speaks to Leclerc’s unassuming, humble demeanor, and the depth of his incredible skills. “He went to solo Professor Falls, a classic WI 4,” Pullan writes, “But he accidentally climbed the wrong route. After getting flown onto the Mendenhall Ice Field on Sunday, March 4, Johnson and Leclerc established a new route on the Main Tower’s north face, on Monday, March 5. Leclerc posted a picture from the top of the Tower announcing the duo’s success. They had skied to the base, leaving a cache of gear along the way, and planned to return to Juneau by Wednesday, March 7.

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. But those who knew Leclerc and Johnson best consider the likelihood of any of those explanations vanishingly small. 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.

Renowned Alpinists Presumed Dead After Ropes Found Above Juneau Icefield

But watch him move over rock or ice or mixed terrain, and you can see that he has the gift. In March of 2018, Marc-Andre Leclerc and his partner Ryan Johnson disappeared after summiting a new route in Alaska’s Mendenhall Towers. This article, originally published in 2017, is a look into who Leclerc was and his motivations for the craft of alpinism. A film about his life, The Alpinist, is now available to watch on Netflix. The towers jut from the Juneau Icefield about 12 miles north of the city.

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.

A Look Back On The Lives Of Marc

When he moved to Squamish, he quit competitions and became interested in mountaineering and technical scrambling. The search continues for two missing climbers who did not return from their ascent of the Mendenhall Towers last week. Winter weather has made it difficult for rescuers to search for Ryan Johnson of Juneau and Marc-Andre Leclerc of British Columbia on the Mendenhall Ice Field. At the time, Leclerc and Harrington were living in a tent with her dog, Goya.

For five years, while I was a freelance writer, and later editor, at Alpinist, I corresponded with Leclerc extensively. One night, while sitting at a dining room table in Jeffersonville, Vermont, I listened until late as he told me of his latest solo climbs. He described getting off-route on an approach in Banff in December 2014, which lead him to onsight solo several pitches of mixed climbing, including a thin standing pillar he referred to as a WI6 pencil. Juneau Mountain Rescue and the Alaska State Troopers have suspended efforts to recover the remains of Squamish climber Marc-André Leclerc, 25, and fellow climber Ryan Johnson, 34. LeClerc’s humble, caring demeanor and careful climbing shine through, as does Harrington’s.

Family and friends were put on alert and began to travel to Alaska to offer support. There’s a GoFundMe page here to help support everyone involved. Ryan and Sam Johnson after making the first ascent of “Path of The Fallen” 310m WI5. Harrington is now sponsored by North Face, and she hopes they’ll fund a climb she wants to do on El Capitan this year. She spends all of her time on the road — the next six months will be spent between the Canadian Rockies, Las Vegas, California and Chile — and keeps her stuff in storage lockers.

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. 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 latter is a riotous and occasionally tragic look at how rock-climbing and wingsuit-flying took hold in the same Californian National Park seven decades ago, confounding both the police and gravity. The pair were summiting a new route on the Mendenhall Towers on March 5 and were expected to return two days later. When they didn’t, Juneau Mountain Rescue and Alaska State Troopers deployed an extensive search and rescue effort.

While heating water, it boiled over and soaked his clothes. 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.

The bodies were never found, just a piece of red rope poking out from a mass of heavy snow. After successfully summiting a new route on the Mendenhall Towers, it seems they were consumed by an avalanche on the descent. ‘The things Marc-André was climbing often fall down at the end of the day’ … the Canadian takes the ice route up. In Patagonia Canadian alpinist Marc-André Leclerc has made the first solo winter ascent of Torre Egger . But the search was called off Monday after teams found two ropes matching the description of their gear in a run-out area.

It was buried underneath snow and ice in a gulley crevasse part of the way down the fourth tower. As he sets his sights on the next project, Leclerc draws inspiration from the pioneering big-wall climbers in Patagonia. “They were climbing the biggest, steepest faces of the Torres,” he says, citing the vision and dedication of the Italian Ermanno Salvaterra. Last October, along with Harrington, Leclerc put up Hidden Dragon (5.12b; 11 pitches), on the Chinese Puzzle Wall across from Slesse, taking eight days. In June 2016, Leclerc traveled to Baffin Island’s Walker Arm with Harrington and Lavigne, to Great Sail Peak.

The weather was indeed horrible, and it forced Leclerc to return to camp but only to return to the climb once the weather cleared. Johnson and Leclerc, two experienced and respected climbers, scaled the north face of what is called the Main Tower in March. As they rappelled down a gulley on the north side of the towers something went wrong. JMR personnel found their ropes and gear in a crevasse in that gulley, using a technology that had never been used for a search-and-rescue in Alaska, according to searchers at the time. 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.

In August 2014 he set out to try three routes – two that were notorious for loose, flaky rock – all alone and unroped. The same Rock and Ice article said Johnson “made waves” in the Mendenhall Towers in 2011 when he free-climbed without ropes a line on the South Buttress of the main tower. He also established a demanding line on the west tower in 2008. A report byRock and Ice called Leclerc’s 2015 solo climb of a route on 10,200-foot Cerro Torre “by far the hardest route” ever solo-climbed there.