apAdventures

posted by ARR

After nearly 3 years we’ve finally compiled and edited our video footage from 2 bouldering trips to Fontainebleau, France. Click on the picture below to watch a little teaser and get psyched. The 30+ minute DVDs should be poppin’ off the press in the next week. Who wants one?…

Check out what we dug up in the archives:

Well, as Paul predicted, it’s been awhile since our last post. Trust me though, we really do have a sweet excuse. We’ve been out of the country for the last couple of weeks, bouldering in Fontainebleau, France. Sorry for no live updates straight from the cozy, hip, European internet cafes. We didn’t really spend much time in them this trip. In fact, we didn’t really spend much time doing any sort of non-climbing hanging-out-type activities. Why? Cause we were too busy out there in the forest squeezin’ *juice* out of the boulders baby! That’s why!!! Fontainebleau was sunny from the day we stepped off the plane until the day we went home (very rare in rainy springtime France). And wow did we take full advantage of every last sun-filled drop – bouldering 10 out of 13 days.

Our bouldering buds on this trip included Courtney (came along with us from the States), Grit and Manu (our dear friends from Germany), Lutz, Chris, Gerald and ‘lil 5 year old Fritz (friends of Grit and Manu – also Germans), and Alex and Lisa (more Germans!). All that time commuting in my car listening to ‘Drive Time French’ prior to this trip….sheesh! I should have been learning to speak German!

So I was debating on whether or not to give a long day-by-day, blow-by-blow rundown for this trip report. And I decided not. Reason being, because every single day of our trip pretty much went kinda sorta like this:

Wake up late morning, 9 or 10am, in our comfy cozy gite. Nominate someone for bakery duty. Said nominee jumps into cutesy little euro roller-skate car and heads down to the bakery in the nearby village, practicing his/her “bakery French” along the way. Baguette, croissants, pastries, cheese, jams, yogurt, fruit, coffee and tea for breakfast. Or seeing as it’s nearing 11am, shall we call this “brunch”? Who cares – Mmmm.

Hit the boulders around noon. Climb, climb, and climb some more. Watch old French men cruise your projects with ease, cheesegrate down the slabs and vote on who has the most banged-up knees for the day, eat baguette like it’s the next generation power-bar, and blurt out Alle! Alle! during every sketchy sloper no-holds topout you see. Continue this ‘till about 7 or 8pm, when the baguette supply runs low.

Back at the gite, it’s now time to bust into some bottles of wine. Someone has volunteered to be chef for the evening and is cooking up his/her special dish for the full house. In traditional French style, dinner lasts around 2-3 hours. More wine, a few bars of chocolate for dessert, stories (both in German and in English), laughs (at the Americans trying to speak German and the Germans trying to speak English), more wine, more stories, a few more laughs to work off the last full chocolate bar each of us just chowed down, one last sip of wine to polish off the bottle, and finally the tired climbers hit the hay around midnight or so.

Sleep like a baby.

Wake up the following morning. Same time. Same blissfull place.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

(more pics on the way)

posted by arr

If you don’t hear from us for awhile, we have a good reason…

Tuesday March 14th:
We woke up at 4:15AM, loaded our crashpads, two backpacks and misc. carry-on bags into Courtney’s truck and were off to the airport. We checked in and by 6:30AM we were airborne. We arrived in Dallas at about 9:00AM. With eight hours to kill we studied some French, climbing guides and ate. At 5:30PM we were on our flight destined for Paris. We actually got a dinner on the plane and watched the movie “Best in Show.”

Wednesday March 15th:
It was amazing that we were even given breakfast on the plane in addition to our dinner. Well, maybe not that amazing considering how hungry April and I were after each meal. Anyway, at about 10:00AM we finally arrived in Paris. Grit and Marcus were outside customs waiting to greet us. We packed our stuff into Grit’s car (barely) and were off towards Fontainebleau. We had reservations to stay in a “mobile home” in the town of Milly La Foret, really close to the main bouldering areas. Turns out, it was really expensive for such a small place. But, at first we didn’t care. We were overwhelmed by everything and were dying to see the rocks and start climbing. By late afternoon we pulled up to Bas Cuvier (one of the most popular climbing areas) and started climbing. We didn’t even open our guide books (common most days) and just started climbing stuff that looked cool. The boulders seemed endless…

Thursday March 16th:
On Thursday we woke up a little bit recovered from the traveling. We co-ordinated with our friend Justin and his girl Mary Gwen to meet up at Franchard Isatis. We didn’t know what the place was going to be like but I’d have to say that it was one of my favorite places to climb on the whole trip. I really can’t go into detail about how cool it was (it would take forever) but at the least I can say there are tons of easy and hard problems that have some of the most fun sequences and holds I’ve ever experienced. The setting is very beautiful too. All the boulders are surrounded by dense forest. We later realized that this setting doesn’t help when you are anticipating the boulders drying off. 🙂 Justin my Fontainebleau coach, pointed out a super cool problem called “Beurre Marga.” It was really technical, mostly vertical and it was a true test to see if you can climb at Fontainebleau. I failed miserably!!! I tore up my arm, got mud all over myself and numerous attempts I couldn’t even pull back on the start of the problem. I swore, yelled, brushed the holds, tried and tried but I had to give up for the day, deciding that I would be back for a final exam towards the end of the trip.

Friday March 17th:
We…I keep saying we. Let me explain: Our Tucson friends, Vince, Tammy and Patrick (met in Tucson, lives in Connecticut, right?), our German friends Grit, Marcus and Manu, and our SLC friends Mary Gwen and Justin climbed together throughout the trip. So picture a lot of crashpads and a lot of good energy. It was cool being around a lot of psyched people.
Friday afternoon was a tease for April and I. Justin showed us some really cool, hard problems located in the Cuvier Rampart area. April was drooling over a ultra classic called Duroxmanie. I was drooling over “The Big Four.” Four hard, highball problems that were all classic and super different. A true test of a versatile climber’s abilities. Since we were feeling totally wasted from the first days of climbing and the afternoon was nearing an end we decided that we should look into finding another place to stay. The “mobile home” we were in wasn’t really working out so well. ha ha. For example: when you took a shower, you’d get burned and then frozen by ice cold water every 10 seconds, a cat pissed on our front porch every day, it was freezing cold inside, I broke our bed three times, just getting into it, etc….
To make a long story short Grit spoke some French, German and English and made arrangements for us to stay in what’s called a Gite, outside the town of etampes, west of Fountainebleau about 35 minutes. It sucked to give up our location but we wanted to experience a Gite like all of our friends. Plus, it was actually cheaper in the end.

Saturday March 18th:
Woke up Saturday morning nice and early to the smell of fresh cat piss on our front porch. Luckily we were out of there. Unluckily though…we didn’t know where our Gite was (long story). ha ha. We did one of the most amazing things ever that day. We pointed our car in the direction of where we thought the Gite was and we drove. Yeah, we drove for a couple hours looking and sometimes just admiring the French countryside but one of the most amazing things in my life
was when I said to Grit and April, “There it is…that’s our Gite.” I saw a sign, the house looked cool and thank God, it was the place!!! The owners welcomed us and by the pictures you’ll see that…yep…it was perfect. I can’t explain how we found it, pure luck.

Sunday March 19th:
Coach Justin said “L’Elepant it the place to be man. See you there.” So we were off to L’Elephant. Take a look at the pics and it’s pretty obvious where the name came from. This area was our first taste of a different forest floor. It was much more sandy than the other areas. The “black circuit” problems were really amazing there. April and Grit tried this one that was really fun. They didn’t send but made amazing progress on a hard, long move. In fact, they gathered the attention of some French guys who came over and tried the problem too. The French guys didn’t know much English so there wasn’t much to talk about. But, there was a lot of giggling, laughing and some common words were shared like “Fart,” “Hueco,” and “Come on!” “Allez.”
Later that day we moved to the area called Rocher Greau. I realized that the French people (the non-climbers) actually understand what it is that we are doing. They don’t look at us like we are crazy, carrying our crashpads (massage tables, beds, all the stupid names people in the US call them). Rocher Greau is an area situated very close to a town where tons of little kids and people are hanging out and enjoying the forest’s beauty. We tried a couple more cool problems but what I remember from that afternoon was the stop in the nearby bakery. Justin recommended this place that had the best freshly made bread I’ve ever had in my life. I won’t even try to describe it, just go…it was amazing!!!
We nearly ruined our feast (which Justin cooked that night) by eating so much bread but we had a good appetite from the full day of climbing.

Monday March 20th:
By Monday we were pretty cocky when it came to talking about weather. Again, we dodged the rain and managed to get a full day of climbing in. We went to Rocher aux Sabots and Cul de Chien. We attacked the circuit problems. When you do one cool problem you look to your side and see another one. It goes on and on. Each problem was so fun. I remember one that we did that was vertical. It had 1 or 2 holds on the face that were nearly impossible to hold on to. It was all about finding the perfect balance. When you got the perfect balance you had to commit and go for the top. Within a second you had to catch the lip of the problem or else you’d be taking the long plummit to the pad.

Tuesday March 21st:
Got to see Paris a little on Tuesday. Our plan was to chill until Manu came into Orly airport at 10PM so we walked around Paris. Paris is such and easy city to get around when you can understand how to ride the metro. We learned. And we managed to find Manu!

Wednesday March 22nd:
Rain! Ahhh. An excuse not to climb. Too bad for Manu who was psyched and ready to go but we were still tired and sore from the long climbing days at the start of our trip. To our benefit we had the chance to connect with the outside world and visit an Internet cafe. We also managed to see the Chateau in Fontainebleau. It was beautiful. In the pictures you’ll see one pic of the library. It is a long hallway of paintings on the curved ceiling with a globe at the forefront. I’m still impressed when I look back at the picture of that particular room.

Thursday March 23rd:
Weather was pretty good. It never rained hard enough to stop us. We managed to re-visit Bas Cuvier and try a million new problems. We also got to try stuff at the Cuiver Rampart and the super classic Duroxmanie.

Friday March 24th:
Rainy. But, we tried out the area called 95.2 which dries quickly. We spent the morning climbing, tired from the full day of climbing on Thursday. Got fully rained out in the afternoon.

Saturday March 25th:
Rain. No big deal though. We visited Barbizon and went for a stellar run in the French countryside near our Gite. Check out the pic of Manu, April and I. It’s the one where we look like wet rats outside our gite.

Sunday March 26th:
Paris day. We didn’t care what the weather was like. We had plans to go to Paris and see the sights. It rained most of the day but cleared up and got warm towards the end of the afternoon. We took the RER train from etampes to Paris and visited the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Jewish Quarter, and Montemartie. Definately not a real rest day. We were exhausted when we returned late Sunday night.

Monday March 27th:
Okay. After the rain and the day in Paris we were psyched to have one more day. The weather cooperated with us and it was perfect. Thank you! We spent the day at Rocher aux Sabot and Franchard Isatis. Remember I said I had to take my “final exam.” Well…I just barely passed. I sent Beurre Marga!

April, Grit and Manu showed their Fontainebleau technique by trying a bunch of red circuit problems. At the end of the day April showed me a problem she sent that reminded her of Hueco. Of course I had to try it. I think the problem really reminded us of home. We were torn between two paradises. We wanted to stay in Fontainebleau and keep climbing, spending time with good friends and experiencing the culture more. But our trip was nearing an end.

Tuesday March 28th:
Last day. Felt like crap from staying up late, traveled and traveled all day but made it back to Tucson safe and sound. Slept well, dreaming of climbing and planning our next visit.

I hope this summary helped to share some of the experiences we had in Fontainebleau, France. I would recommend that if you have the chance, go! It was such an amazing place. March is the time. Yeah, there’s a lot of rain but temps are really good and the friction is prime. The climbing is different, the ratings are different, the language, food, people and architecture are different. We got a taste of a different culture and we’re craving more. Our list of places to climb just grew and you can count on us taking some wild trips in the future. We just scratched the surface and saw the tip of the iceberg when it comes to World travel.

Of course we’ll be back to Fontainebleau, we’ve got unfinished business…

I promised a Fontainebleau trip summary and it will be up soon. When I said we had to recover from our travels, I lied. We had to go climbing again. It was nice climbing at Hueco the last couple days. The weather is still nice, in our opinion. Kind of warm but perfect in the shade. Hopefully it will stay this way for the next month at the least.

We made it back from Fontainebleau France and are going about our daily routines. When we recover from our travels we will have videos and pictures up sometime Sunday. Stay tuned for the summary of all the stuff we did. It was AWESOME!!!

finally made it to a internet cafe
the keyboards are so different. ill list the highlights

first of all everything is great
the weather was awesome for the entire 1st week.
we are living in french luxury in a beautiful rural gite in the country with grit from Germany and her boyfriend manu.
the large city near us is étampes.

everyone speaks french. thanks to grit we made our way through some crazy situations.
we ran into so many people we know from the US climbing scene. we are learning french at a very fast, forced rate. it is awesome.

climing is amazing. each day we go to a new area that is as big as some areas at hueco.
the climbing is very different though. very technical. the turtle shell slopers are RAD!

the wine and bakeries are a part of our daily routine.

went to paris yesterday by metro.
will go back to go inside the louvre.

today we went in the castle of fontainebleau.
today it is raining and we are taking advantage of rest time

hopefully tomorrow it will clear and we can try another ton of new problems that are some of the best in the world.