Climbing a few rocks in Fontainebleau

The Easter bunny was French for me this year! I joined the Tilburg climbing club on their trip to the Fontainebleau bouldering area. Ten of us packed into cars, and with crash pads strapped to the back we drove to France for the long weekend.

Repping TILSAC!

Fontainebleau is a cute town about 60kms south of Paris and home to a legendary bouldering area.

The area was very French and adorable

 It was one of the first areas in the world to be developed as a bouldering spot, and is now one of the largest, with hundreds of problems. It started as an area for French Alpinists to practise their skills:

"In 1874 Ernest Cézanne created the Club Alpin Français in Paris. During hiking trips to the nearby Fontainebleau, its members discovered for themselves the magic of these sandstone boulders. As they fell under the forest's spell, they realized bouldering would be an excellent way to prepare for their future alpine expeditions." - Fontainebleau by Emmanuel Ratouis

An old pic from about 1938

Today, some of the routes are super famous, including a few quirky boulders- one looks like a dog, another an elephant :)

This is the dog boulder. People are banned from climbing it now,
because it's deteriorating. And no, it didn't look more like
a dog before. I asked :)

The landscape is pretty cool, with sandstone boulders strewn about everywhere, some in the forest and others in open areas on sand. I've since found out about the geological history of the place, which is interesting. I failed at my attempt to summarise it, but check out this video if you're wondering:

As you can imagine I was pretty excited to check the place out!

We arrived in the dark at about 2am, making me feel like I was back home with the Victoria Univeristy Tramping Club! We were camping, which I was assured is generally fine this time of year. Considering that the weather seems to have forgotten to be Spring, however, it was a slightly different story. We had a few snowflakes at one stage. But we coped with many many layers and nice big campfires. 

Fire!
Marshmallows were involved of course, but
I got really weird looks with my  'burn them
to a crisp' roasting style. Apparently the Dutch
 stick to the conservative 'golden brown' technique. 

At the campsite: the zucchini chopping contingency.

We spent three days bouldering, and it was fantastic. It was insanely awesome to be back on real rock, and I got some cool routes in. A few challenges of course, and a popped knee and sore muscles by the end of it, but so worth it.

A boulder! This one I was particularly happy to get to the top of,
hence the pic :)

Scenic lunch spot on day one

An actual climbing pic... sorry for the absence
of a hardcore upside-down action shot

Serious rock analysing. That's my serious face.

The trip was also an opportunity to test out the various uses of a crashpad...

A handy spot to lie on (we did a lot of this!)...

... in a sandwich...

.... or as a battering ram.

Because it was Easter, we included plenty of chocolate in the weekend. I got to enjoy the Dutch hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) on baguette for breakfast. We had a bit of an Easter hunt, climbing style, with Wouter hiding mini Easter eggs on routes for successful climbers to find :)

So all up it was a successful trip! On Monday we trundled back to civilisation, very happy climbers.

Our happy climber faces