Brette Harrington’s Love Affair with the Chinese Puzzle Wall

Part One: Placing the First Piece

In late August of 2014, two young climbers—both barely out of their teens—made light work of Slesse Mountain, a serious peak in the northern Cascades of Canada’s British Columbia. The young man of the party free soloed three different routes—East Buttress Direct (5.10+), Navigator Wall (5.10+), and Northeast Buttress (5.9+)—covering close to 9,000 feet of technical, sometimes friable, alpine rock in a little over 12 hours. Meanwhile, the young lady had onsight free soloed the mountain’s North Rib route—a 2,800-foot 5.9—before meandering back to the Memorial Plaque at the base of the mountain. She sat down for a pleasant afternoon of reading as she waited for her beaux to return.

The couple were none other than Marc-André Leclerc and Brette Harrington, aged 20 and 21. They were just young groms in the climbing scene then, but clearly up and coming stars, with dreams much larger than Slesse could contain. Even in the midst of her impressive solo Harrington couldn’t help but plot her next adventure. For example, the steep, diamond-shaped wall of gleaming white granite perched high above the other side of the Nesakwatch Valley. The 500-meter wall was invisible from the valley floor, but from her vantage point high on the flanks of Slesse it shone so prominently she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

Leclerc and Harrington, of course, were not the first two climbers to be drawn to the aptly named Chinese Puzzle Wall (CPW). A number of skilled climbers—mostly under-the-radar Canadians, but also Fred Beckey—had made a handful of attempts dating back to the 1980s. The CPW was shrouded in lore and mystery, which would have been alluring enough for Leclerc and Harrington on its own. But the wall also brimmed with possibilities—soaring corners and buttresses carving the face up into a bevy of vertical lines stretching from base to summit, with numerous horizontal fissures hinting at natural belay or bivy ledges along the way. The wall looked like its namesake—a tessellation of puzzle pieces that fit together just right, through some strange, almost inexplicable, alchemy. It would make for spectacular climbing if all the pieces held together; but that “if” was a big and consequential one.

Leclerc and Harrington agreed that someday they would put up a route on the wall. But they didn’t feel ready. So they spent the rest of the summer and fall of 2014 practicing big wall climbing in Squamish. That winter, in El Chaltén, Patagonia, Harrington made the first free solo ascent of Chiaro di Luna—a 750-meter 5.11a on Aguja Saint Exupéry—and Leclerc made the first solo ascent of Cerro Torre via the Corkscrew Route (5.10d A1 90°; 1,219m). After Patagonia, they traveled to Yosemite Valley for a ground-up free ascent of the Muir Wall (5.13b/c) on El Capitan (Leclerc freed the entire route, Harrington was stymied by a single height-dependent move on pitch 29). Then, in the summer of 2016, they joined Joshua Lavigne to put up two El Cap-sized first ascents on Great Sail Peak on Baffin Island, with difficulties up to 5.13. A photo of Brette warming her hands from a precarious perch in the middle of the steep wall became the cover shot of the 2017 American Alpine Journal. Meanwhile, amid all this activity, Leclerc had broken through the climbing stratosphere with his paradigm-shattering solos of Mt. Robson’s Emperor Face, and the East Face of Torre Egger in winter.

By the time they were back from Baffin, Leclerc and Harrington felt prepared to try a new route on the CPW. That August, carrying a portaledge, ropes, a hand drill and bolts, pins, copperheads, various gardening tools, and food for a week of hard labor, they hiked up through logging cuts and dense old-growth forest to the base of the wall. They were equal parts exhausted and elated when they crashed that night. In spite of all their impressive recent climbs, Harrington noted as she settled into bed that she had never slept under a wall so steep in her life. She hoped the precariously perched blocks overhead would be more solid than they appeared.

In the morning, Leclerc and Harrington started up a crack system that their friends Tony McLane and Dan Tetzlaff had told them about. The strong B.C.-based climbers had been the wall’s most recent suitors, in 2008, when McLane took a gear-ripping fall on the first pitch of a ground-up attempt. Cracks and corners led upward like an arrow to a massive dihedral with a prominent orange lichen-streaked wall. Leclerc thought it looked like a tiger stripe. Crouching Tiger, they agreed, would be a fitting name for the first route on the wall. Leclerc climbed carefully on the pitch that had bouted McLane, successfully arriving at a comfortable belay ledge without event. But shortly after Harrington began up the second pitch, she arrived at a precarious jumble of loose blocks. She realized that one wrong move could have sent the whole pile tumbling, likely killing her partner and lover. So she backed off and returned to the belay. Undeterred, Leclerc traversed left and found an equally tantalizing crack system to climb—possibly even better. And so they began to make their way up what would eventually become the wall’s actual first route, Hidden Dragon.

They soon realized that the wall’s crack systems were far too vegetated to facilitate ground-up free climbing, so they climbed in big wall style. One person would push the route upward via solo aiding while the other would rappel, clean, and prep the previous pitch for free climbing. They would dispatch a few pitches this way, haul their portaledge camp up, then rap back down and lead the newly cleaned terrain, freeing the route as they went. After a few days of toiling through hard blue-collar labor in a brutal heat wave, Harrington took the lead on yet another difficult pitch—The Mirage Corner—which Leclerc had named after noticing that due to a shift in lichen, the corner looked dark from below, but light from above. Harrington battled through steep, flared cracks and delicate smears before trying to run out the final few meters to the chains. But she pumped out and took a massive whipper, core-shotting her rope in the process. Out of water and exhausted, she and Leclerc decided to rap to the ground to restock on water for another push.

They returned to the wall after a period of rest and free climbed back up to their high point. Harrington successfully freed the Mirage Corner at 5.12b. As they pushed upward, eager to establish an all-free line, they were stumped by two immaculate pitches of arête and seam climbing, which they aided on pitons and copperheads. Free climbing the pitches would require a number of bolts, but they lacked a power drill and were eager to avoid the laborious chore of hand-drilling bolts. So they rapped back to the Mirage Corner and cut right on a ramp which led past the arête to a flaring layback crack that they knew they could free without bolts. They summited after seven days of equipping and freeing the line.

The Chinese Puzzle Wall had finally been climbed, and in a proud style, to boot. But as they rapped back over the elegant arête and seam that had stymied their original vision, they marveled again at the phenomenal quality of those pitches. “One day,” Leclerc told Harrington, “a photo of someone free climbing that arête will be on the cover of a guidebook.” They didn’t verbally agree to come back to bolt and free the two-pitch variation. They didn’t need to. That, like so many things between them, went without saying.

Part Two: Filling in the Blanks

I was surprised in August 2018 when Brette asked me to join her for a new route on the Chinese Puzzle Wall. It had been five months since Marc’s tragic death with Ryan Johnson in the Mendenhall Towers, on Alaska’s Juneau Icecap. Although Brette was shattered, Marc’s death had not dampened her enthusiasm for climbing. If anything, the opposite was true.

I had not been close with Marc, but had admired him deeply. We met briefly in Bariloche, Argentina, back in the winter of 2013-14 when he was on his way down to Cerro Mariposa with Will Stanhope, Paul McSorley, and my friend and roommate, Matty Van Biene. A few months later, while staying with Matty and me at Index, Washington, I got to admire his bold and technically masterful climbing firsthand. But the bulk of our relationship was professional in nature, as I edited (lightly) many of his American Alpine Journal reports, including his gripping account of soloing Robson and Egger—which, to this day, remains my favorite story I’ve ever edited. Every time I spoke or worked with Marc was special to me. But I was hesitant to believe I could mean much to him. I tried to give him the space that I felt all famous people deserved, not wanting to be one of those obnoxious cling-ons that attach themselves to uncommonly gifted people like sucker fish to sharks. As such, our friendship was distant at best.

So why me? Certainly Brette—and her climbing partner for the mission, Caro North, whom I knew from a previous trip to Cochamó—would not need my help with the climbing. Maybe it was because I had worked with Brette on her AAJ writeup of Hidden Dragon two years prior, and she and I had chatted informally about her, Marc, and I all climbing up there together someday. Whatever the reason, I was honored, and immediately agreed to drive up from Seattle. A few days later, I was on my way to Agassiz, the rural town where Marc grew up, and the closest to the CPW, to meet Brette in person for the first time, as well as Marc-André’s mom, Michelle Kuipers; his stepfather, Henry Kuipers; and his younger brother, Elijah Leclerc. Meeting some of Marc’s family (he is also survived by his sister, Bridgid-Anne Dunning, and father Serge Leclerc) was surreal, insofar as I didn’t really know how to justify my presence in their homes, and lives. I worried I might be seen as an intruder, a fanboy, an unwanted interloper sniffing out a story. But I was greeted with warmth and open arms.

After dinner, as Brette and Caro went upstairs to pack their bags, Michelle and I struck up a conversation about Marc, and how I had come to know him. More than that, though, Michelle talked to me about Brette, who she was immensely proud of, and clearly loved deeply. Rather than turn away from climbing since Marc’s death, Brette had doubled down on it. Climbing was a tie—certainly not the only one, but a potent one—that bound them together. She and Marc had discussed the possibility of one of them dying in a climbing accident, and promised each other that if such a tragedy came to pass, if anything happened to one of them, whoever was left would continue pursuing the adventurous life that they had so loved living together. Michelle approved of this course explicitly, and was so excited for Brette to return to the valley that had been so special to Marc: his home stomping grounds, the place that taught him more about climbing than anywhere else. And me—she was excited for me to see it, too. To see if I could feel his presence there. I’ve always been a bit skeptical, if not cynical, about matters of spirituality. Feeling the presence of someone whose body I knew lay more than 1,000 miles away in the belly of a glacier seemed a tall order to me at the time, though I hoped to be proven wrong.

The following video is of Brette Harrington on pitch five of what would become Crouching Tiger, established alongside the author and Caro North. Video: Kieran Brownie

In the morning of August 4 Caro, Brette, and I piled into Brette’s diminutive Isuzu, and made our way into the Nesakwatch valley. As we bumped along rutted-out roads better suited to trucks and four-wheelers, I marveled at how much Brette and her car had in common. Small but mighty. Although we were only a short distance from the United States border, the dense old-growth forest felt distinctly wild, like we had been transported far into the backcountry. As we wound our way up a steep section of old growth, I could hear Marc’s voice in the back of my head, telling me how much he had learned about alpine climbing—how to balance, how to transfer your weight from side to side—simply by walking up forested hillsides like this in the rain. After a couple hours of sweaty hiking we arrived at a huge slickrock drainage; the forest’s thick curtain parted and we got our first view of the wall. As Marc and Brette had both told me on numerous occasions, it looked phenomenal—dead vertical to overhanging from bottom to top, half as tall as El Cap, and chock full of laser cut corners, roofs, and arêtes. And with the exception of Hidden Dragon, the wall was a blank canvas. I began to get psyched about the climbing, something I really hadn’t thought about much up until that point.

When we arrived at the base, it didn’t take long to pick out our route. Brette was clearly drawn to the line they had dubbed Crouching Tiger. Maybe the loose-block stack that had stymied her first attempt would have collapsed on its own accord, or maybe it was more solid than she remembered. Either way, she was confident we could surpass it somehow, and the terrain above looked stellar: a steep finger crack capped by a roof, soaring dihedrals split by what looked like hand cracks, another roof encounter higher up, and, after that, more mysteries to uncover. I had hoped for an independent line, but then, I wasn’t coming at it from Brette’s perspective. Of course she would want to finish up the line she and Marc had begun.

Caro led the first pitch, and brought Brette and I up. Brette tip toed up the second pitch, carefully stemming around the blocks, which turned out to be slightly more solid than she had first thought. Caro volunteered to scrub the first two pitches into free climbing shape while Brette and I pushed the ropes upward. Brette led a wild tips splitter through a roof, cleaning some friable rock as she went, and aiding in places. She fixed a rope, and we rapped back to Caro, then down to the base to make camp for the night.

That evening, just before sunset, a gentle rain rolled through and we ducked into a small cave to seek cover. It was tight quarters but not uncomfortable, and as the mist cleared from the valley below we watched a beautiful sunset of pastel pinks and blues bathe Mt. Slesse in an otherworldly light. The clouds were spirit-like as they rose and twisted through the sky, ethereal and fleeting. I thought of Marc-André, wondered how many times he had spent similar moments in this selfsame valley, perhaps on the other side looking towards the place we now sat. Caro, Brette, and I shared quiet conversation in that cave waiting for the rain to pass. I can’t remember a word we said, and yet, somehow I recall this brief interlude as one of the highlights of the trip.

In the morning we zipped back up the fixed lines and Caro took the lead up the tiger stripe. She climbed quickly and confidently through steep and flaring 5.11 terrain. There was no question where the fifth pitch would go—the only feasible option was a line of vegetation up a flared and wide-looking hand crack. Nobody argued when I volunteered for what I suspected would be a workmanlike affair, so I cast off and began gardening. Fortunately, most of the vegetation was dead, and pulled out easily by hand. Though not much of a wide climber, I managed to scrap my way through the flared cupped hands and fists. The reward for my efforts was perfect hand jams through a roof capped by a technical stemming finish, all on immaculate, grippy, black stone. It was 5.11 crack climbing at its best—still one of the best pitches of new routing I have done to this day.

We fixed ropes again, rapped back to the ground, slept, and hiked out together on Monday morning after two days on the wall. I had to head back to Seattle, but Brette and Caro returned two days later with a resupply of food and gear, and established the rest of the line, including the crux seventh pitch, and another 5.12 pitch immediately after, before joining Hidden Dragon’s final three pitches. My share of the hard work had been nominal at best, but Brette and Caro still invited me to come along for the redpoint attempt a week later. I met up with Brette, Caro, and Marc and Brette’s good friend, ace photographer Kieran Brownie, on the morning of August 11. As we made our preparations I could feel the shared grief, but also joy and remembrance, between Kieran and Brette acutely. Again, I felt like a bit of an outsider—honored and humbled in equal parts to participate in a new route which meant something more to Brette and Kieran than I thought it ever could to me.

We hiked up in the evening, pitched camp at the base of the wall, and went to sleep. We had all noticed rocks eerily whizzing past us during our time there—some mysterious force prying them loose from above—and vowed to sleep close to the wall in hopes they would sail into the forest beyond us. Still, Caro reported waking with a start when a big rock slammed into the ground not far from where she slept. It was an eerie place. Beautiful and serene, but also serious and severe.

The four of us made our way up the wall caterpillar style—Kieran jugging fixed lines and pulling them up so he could shoot from above, then us swapping leads and following each other behind him. Brette made quick work of the 5.12 tips splitter, Caro led the tiger stripe again, and then I freed the phenomenal fifth pitch.

Caro was beginning to feel ill, so I belayed Brette while she sent the route’s 5.12b crux without seemingly much difficulty. I tried my best to lift Caro’s spirits, but was unsuccessful. She had been living life on the sharp end for many months at that point, climbing and new routing all over the world, and that living, it seemed, had finally caught up with her. She was one of the most stoked climbers I had ever met, and it was unnerving to see her so deflated, but I suppose everyone has a breaking point.

Kieran had gotten the photos he needed so he and Caro headed down. But Brette—who had not fallen to that point—and I were equally excited to carry on, and make an integral free ascent of the route. After one more 5.12a pitch, and the final three pitches of Hidden Dragon, we stood on the summit crest, proud to have placed another hard-earned piece of the puzzle. We sat there for a few minutes looking out at Slesse, thinking our own thoughts, then headed back down to meet up with Caro and Kieran. I slept like a baby that night. If any rocks plummeted past me, I didn’t notice them.

I woke in the morning at the ass crack of dawn as I had to get back to Seattle. With the rest of the team sleeping I filled my pack with as much gear as I could carry, said some silent goodbyes, and started down the slabs. In spite of thick smoke from a nearby forest fire, I could see Slesse clearly shining in the morning light. I felt very strongly as if I were directly in the presence of Marc-André Leclerc. As if he were no more gone now than Slesse would be when the next storm rolled through, and blanketed the mountain in clouds.

Part Three: Finishing the Puzzle

That was five years ago and then some. Since our ascent of Crouching Tiger, my life largely carombed off in the opposite direction from Brette and Caro’s. While they continued to put up new routes (as well as alpine-skiing first descents), I moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, got married, and eventually settled down into a copywriting career—at least I tried to before getting fired from two jobs in a 12-month span, but that’s a different story. I tore my ACL in March 2023 playing basketball with a bunch of high schoolers (of all things), haven’t touched stone in months, and with a baby due any day now, I expect climbing will only continue to fade into the background of my life. Caro, on the other hand, is a newly-minted North Face athlete who gained recent notoriety for an all-women sailing and climbing expedition to Greenland. And Brette seems to be spending most of her time these days dangling from hooks in an enormous limestone cave in Sardinia, where she is establishing a ground-up, multipitch, likely 5.14, sport route with her partner, Elliot Bernhagen. We keep in touch, if fleetingly.

I haven’t been back to the Chinese Puzzle Wall, and, if I’m being honest, haven’t thought about it much since 2018 either—although I do think of Brette, Caro, Marc, and even some of Marc’s family frequently. Brette, on the other hand, can’t stay away.

In 2019, Brette returned to CPW with Tony McLane to put up Manchu Wok (5.12d; 500m) to the right of Crouching Tiger. In 2020 they were back at it, this time with their friend Nate MacDonald. They soloed technical forested terrain left of the wall to reach the summit crest, then rapped in on Hidden Dragon to try and free the direct pitches that had eluded Brette and Marc in 2016. But it was cold, wet, and miserable, and they soon gave up and bailed. Then Brette and Nate returned in 2021, establishing Cajun Moon (with free climbing up to 5.12 but one boulder problem they couldn’t figure out) slightly uphill and to the left of Hidden Dragon. They came close to freeing it, but Brette came down with Covid right as the season was closing out.

Finally, in the summer of 2022, Brette returned to the CPW intent on finishing Hidden Dragon Direct. “I definitely went out of my way for it,” she told me when we caught up on the phone recently. “I had been thinking about it for six years. It was an implicit idea that Marc and I would go back and free it eventually.”

Joining Brette were Nate and Tony—who went back to Cajun Moon and managed to free it at 5.12c—as well as Kieran Brownie and Elliot Bernhagen who were there to get footage for a film Reel Rock wanted to make about Brette and her history with the wall. “Unfortunately, they told us they didn’t have enough footage, and the film has never been made,” Brette told me.

But their efforts in 2022 were not without reward, as Brette was finally able to finish off Hidden Dragon Direct. “It was amazing to climb it,” she said, “almost magical in a way. There’s just something about opening up a new pitch, it doesn’t go free, and then you finally free it. It’s like the myth becomes reality. It had been in my mind for so many years at that point. It was really moving for me for it to finally be done.”

Curiously, the final pitches—which she and Marc had guessed would clock in around 5.13—ended up being no harder than 5.12c, and Brette sent them in relatively short order once the protection bolts were in. Chinese puzzles have a tendency to be that way—seemingly impossible at first, but then pretty doable once you figure them out.

“I guess I was hoping it would be harder,” Brette said, “but the climbing is so good it doesn’t matter. And besides, it goes along with the nature of that line. Almost every pitch is 5.12b, so to now have two pitches of 5.12c in the middle, back to back, is really nice. It makes that line complete.”

Today, the Chinese Puzzle Wall sports four complete free lines from 5.12b to 5.12d, all of excellent quality, with plenty of room for more routes and variations. All four lines are steep, sustained, serious, and established in part by Brette. Initially, Brette and Marc had intended to keep the wall a secret. At least until they had done the first ascents they wanted to.

“I don’t know if Marc ever changed his mind about that,” Brette said, “but I did. After Marc was gone, I realized that I needed to share it if I ever wanted to find a partner to climb there with me. And then, the more I talked about it, the more I realized it’s just never going to become super crowded. It still retains that mystery to it, that reputation for being kind of serious, kind of scary.”

Marc-André Leclerc spent so much time on Slesse Mountain honing his skills, soloing massive linkups, and establishing new routes. It almost feels as if that peak ought to bear his name. Meanwhile, nobody has spent more time on the Chinese Puzzle Wall than Brette Harrington. At this point, it seems likely that nobody ever will.

How fitting, then, that these two beautiful mountain faces are destined to face one another in perpetuity? Each reflecting the other’s beauty, sunlight bouncing back and forth between them, effortlessly across space and time. Neither thwarted or overshadowed by the either. One shorter than the other, to be sure, but certainly no less proud.

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