Fontainebleau Beta

Fontainebleau is a bouldering paradise located in the heart of the Fontainebleau Forest, approximately 60 kilometers (about 37 miles) southeast of Paris.

There is a lifetime of climbing here, it’s super beautiful and awesome. The rock is sandstone, but bulletproof sandstone. The entire area is extremely aesthetic.

I don’t have that much experience with climbing here - only one day. But it was a great day.

Resources

For routefinding/guidebook, the crag and Mountain Project are really not the resource. There are over 27,000 routes in Fontainebleau, and they have their own system.

• bleau.info - source of truth for routes and information
• fontainebleaurules.com - they are french, follow their rules or they will bite you

Getting There

Assuming no car, it is indeed possible to do a day trip from Paris, completely on foot. Here’s what I did:

• Take the R train to Fontainebleau station (about 1 hour)
• Take a bus to S’Cape to rent a crash pad - probably best to call ahead, they denied renting me a pad at first. It only took one round of negotation for them to relent.
• From there, I walked all the way to Rocher D’Avon. I chose this crag because it looked the most walkable from S’Cape.

All in all, I left my hotel around 9am, got to Fontainbleau around 11:30am, got to the crag around 1pm, and climbed until 4:30pm. I had to leave at that time in order to get the crash pad back to S’Cape before they closed at 6pm. I wouldn’t recommmend doing it this way — tons of walking, from S’Cape to the crag. That took about 2.5hrs of my day. Almost would say the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, considering the entire journey to/from Paris just for about 4hrs of climbing.

How to Climb at Font

There’s basically two options afaict:

Firstly: Climb like you would climb at any other bouldering crag — warm up on some easy ones, then try a hard boulder just slightly above your limit for the rest of the day until you have no skin left.

The second, more old-school, more canonically Fontainebleau option: Climb Circuits. Fontainebleau has these circuits which are really cool collections of usually 15-30 boulders in a crag. The boulders are labeled with paint — the color indicates difficulty, and the number indicates the order in which they are climbed.

Here’s a quick guide to the colors:

Color	Font Grade Range	Level
White	Children’s routes	Very easy
Yellow	1A – 3C	Easy (beginner)
Orange	2A – 4B	Easy (beginner)
Blue	3B – 5C	Intermediate
Red	5A – 6C	Advanced
Black	6A – 7B+	Expert
White dots	7A and up	Elite/hardest circuits

I climbed the Orange circuit at Avon. It was a great experience. Kinda hard to find the routes, and I would say most of them were in the v1-v3 range, so it was easy. I wanted to maximize my climbing time. I only climbed about 12 boulders, but it was awesome.

There’s tons of bouldering to do here. I feel a bit regretful that I didn’t climb more.

Other Stuff

The town + Fontainebleau castle thing looks super incredible for a picnic opportunity. I would love to go back and do that.