Of Skin & Rock - Vol.11
FONTAINEBLEA
FRANCE
FONTAINEBLEAU, commonly nicknamed ‘the birthplace of bouldering’, is a huge, hilly forest just south of Paris, littered in sandstone boulders. Its title is well deserved, climbers first ventured onto its rockface’s in the 1870s and from the 30s onwards it was a popular training ground for the French alpinists attempting to tackle some of the world’s tallest and most deadly mountains. The French team that made the first successful ascent of Aconcagua’s South face (the tallest mountain outside of Asia) featured three Bleausards (Bleau-climbers). In the bouldering community today, it is a cultural hub – a way to separate the Insider from the Outsider – ‘You haven’t made you pilgrimage to Fontainebleau? You must be a casual climber’. Considering this, you may understand my excitement while huddled around a pub fire one drizzling spring night as the boys from Portland planned, booked, and celebrated what would be my first climbing trip outside the UK.
THE journey would be far longer than my travels along the Dorset coast, and so I reluctantly decided to retire my large format camera for a Fuji 6x9 rangefinder – this also allowed me to shoot in colour. Keeping the Profoto flash, I packed up my bare essential belongings and squeezed into a small Mitsubishi van for what would become an 18-hour drive, ending in a tent on the side of a rainy country track at 1:00am (my excitement was growing more and more). We were later joined by other familiar faces, one by one arriving in self-converted vans or hatchbacks stuffed with bouldering pads. As soon as the last tent had been pitched and our commune completed, we were off - following vague local directions to the nearest crag, Justice de Chambergeot. After around an hour of climbing, Will (or ‘Will with the Kid’ as he was known to us) slipped off a final boulder move and fell 3 metres, his foot slipping between the pads and landing on the rock beneath. Although he wouldn’t find out until his X-ray in England two weeks later, the fall had badly fractured his ankle. Reluctantly, he limped back down the loose trail, disappearing into the forest and leaving the others trying the same climb that had just cracked his Fibula.
THE following day we lay our sights on Bas Cuvier, one of the most famous crags in Fontainebleau (and probable Europe). We left Will nursing his ankle, which by this point had doubled in size and turned a deep purple, and clambered back into the little Mitsubishi van. Bas Cuvier was unlike any crag I had seen before; a dense scatter of mammoth boulders, with a network of alleys and openings between them. Wondering through this maze reminded me of wondering through an indoor climbing gym, a thin walkway that led to another room, and again and again, until we had found a free wall – I could see how easily you could get lost here. With the pads in place, we began, and didn’t stop for several hours. Having just sent a little traverse, an American woman and (I assume) her mother quizzed me on the section of wall I had just climbed, we talked for a few minutes before I headed around the corner to rejoin my group. I was met with “Do you know who that was?! That’s Beth Rodden, Tommy Caldwell’s ex-wife!”.
AS I started to feel the wear on my skin, there was a sudden and very loud grumble. We at looked at one another knowing that the sun we had enjoyed was quickly leaving, and all rushed to pack up our belongings. As I had feared, navigating a swift route back to the vans was near impossible, so as the rain began to fall, we closely followed the climbers speaking French through the alleys and openings until we, and 100 other disappointed, pad-clad figures loaded back into their vans. Waking up early the following morning, I was the first to see the full damage. Half the tents had flooded, the tarp over the pads was clinging on with one bungee, and much of our kit and chalk was sodden – luckily my camera gear was safe as I had taken to sleeping with it out of fear of Fontainebleau’s reputation for carjacking and break-ins.
My approach was similar to the Dorset shoots; the group would decide on the boulder or route to be tackled, I would setup my flash and composition using my digital camera before copying the settings over to the film and waiting for the right moment to capture the image. Retiring the Victorian-style large format camera for the Fuji 6x9 allowed me to shoot from places I had previously never thought possible. ‘An unknown British climber digs deep on L'Bérézina-Carnage, Bas Cuvier, 2024’, had me 3 meters up a tree, sat on a branch with my legs tightly wrapped around the trunk – allowing me to lean out over the top of the boulder and operate the bulky camera with both hands. The range of angle, perspective, and colour was greatly improved by the change in format.
