Fontainebleau Fussing

Sunday, September 21, 2008

So this was our second-to-last climbing day of the trip, and we were now back at Fontainebleau. I was bouldering somewhat better than I was the first time around, and was fussing a little bit less about trick beta and glassy footholds. In the morning we almost had a disaster where Nick just barely managed to get bread for breakfast before everything closed down for the day, but he managed it, so that was good. We ate lunch in the parking lot of Beauvais-Rocher du Duc East, an area neither Nick nor I had been to before. We also noticed that some sort of triathlon involving running, mountain biking (vélo tout-terrain), and bouldering had happened that morning (there were posters about it). Nick was happy about this, because he and some of his friends had heard about this before, but had never actually known any details. So I think he's fantasizing about doing this some year.

After lunch we gathered our things to actually head into the forest for some bouldering, but unfortunately we found out that somehow his camera had gotten a little bit squished in its case, pushing the lens cap into the filter that was on it and breaking the filter -- and apparently it's an odd-sized filter that's tough to find. So that was too bad. We don't really know exactly what happened to it. But we gathered up our stuff anyway to head in for the climbing. After walking about 20 feet up the dirt path toward the boulders, I realized that Nick had forgotten the crashpad, and had to send him back to get that.

Now we finally had everything and headed up to the boulders. It was pretty cold at first, but the sun started to come out and it turned warm enough when we were actually moving around. We did mostly Red Circuit problems, some of which we were successful on and some less so.



At one point, Nick wandered off to go see where some more of the problems on the circuit were while I stayed at one cluster of boulders with the crashpad. It kind of seemed like Nick had been gone for a while, and I started to get annoyed -- he had the the guidebook and I was bored. Eventually he showed up with a scraped arm. "Nika I hurt myself." Apparently he had seen a problem on the circuit and decided to quickly jump on the start of it without the pad. Just as quickly, he managed to shoot himself backwards off of it and into a tree on like the first move. Poor Nick.

I went over to go see the problem -- and it turned out to be really easy. I don't know what his problem was. I pointed to a birch tree about two feet away, directly behind it, and said "oh, is that the tree that got you?" No. The tree that got him was about five feet away, diagonally, down a little hole. I really don't know how he managed to land on that one.

Eventually we decided to finish up there after a couple hours. It took us a long time to the correct path to the way out, since Nick didn't know the area and I wasn't paying any attention to how we came in. We eventually found a path that spit us out a good 5 minutes from the parking lot. But we did find the car in the end.

From there, we headed over to Canche aux Merciers for Nick to work on his long-term project, a 6C+ (V5+) called Le Nez. It's a traverse into a roof, with a hard move on the roof and then a topout. It's all comically close to the ground -- the top of the boulder is about waist-high. But it was a surprisingly good problem. Nick has apparently been working it for ages, so he did a few of the moves, and then launched into trying to link it. I worked on it for a little bit while he was trying it, too, but I wasn't able to do the crux bump move on the roof. But so after a little bit Nick managed to send! That's the hardest-graded climb that he's done at Fontainebleau, so it was great that he finally sent.











So it was overall a good day. At one point I got stroppy when Nick insisted on following me up a problem I just did in his sandals, but I got over it when he admitted that that was a jerky thing to do. At this point Fontainebleau was finally starting to grow on me.