Our Final Farewell to Fontainebleau

We awoke on Monday to some terrific October weather. The road dries in the morning sunshine from the overnight dew. It’s about this time always on our trips that the reminder of real life is drawing near. 

We drive to the Bois Rond crag for the day, just on the outskirts of some of the closed burned areas from this summer’s past forest fire. Knowing how large the fire was, there still was so much green and growth in the forest. We never saw any of the burned areas first hand. 

A short walk in the woods, including a friendly hello from a yellow Labrador, brought us to the quiet crag. We ended up having all of the rocks to ourselves this day, a first. A mixture of slabs and walls, the rocks here look almost space-like, with moon like craters and holes on the surfaces. 

Tall pine trees shoot up overhead of us giving us nice shade throughout the day. I conquer a slab, one of the climbs I’m most proud of. There are a few others I try as well, but don’t see the top of the rock on those in this session. Asa tops out on some strong climbs, some slabs as well.

Our toes and bodies tell us to end the day around 4pm. We freshen up at the AirBnb for an Italian dinner out at an “Italian apertivo” restaurant – a spot featuring cocktails, charcuterie boards, and a few main dishes like lasagne made with ingredients straight from Italy. It’s a more casual spot than other restaurants we’ve been to, but perhaps the best drinks. And delicious tiramisu! 

A later night than usual, we doze off quickly. Tuesday we’ve dedicated for a lazy, vacation day. We wake up when we do, stroll down to the market to pick up some final treats for our final few days, pop into a couple of stores, and head back to the Airbnb for an afternoon of champagne, desserts, and endless TV watching.

We started a new show called Shetland – a police procedural set in the Shetland islands of Scotland, it’s quite good, would recommend!

Our lazy Tuesday sunsets into our final day of the trip, which ends with climbing. The last crag we visit is Butte aux Dames. This was perhaps my favorite setting of a crag. It felt a touch more woodsy and on top of the rocks, you could sometimes see the top of the tree lines. And the beautiful bird song! So many gave us a delightful soundtrack to our final day.

This crag was primarily slabs and slopers, a sloper being where there is a curved divet in the rock and you’re relying on friction and weight distribution to maintain holding on the rock. Asa had the most attempts at this crag on the black circuit climbs compared to previous crags. 

Fontainebleau has a really wonderful climbing grading system, using colors and circuits. Circuits are sorted by color starting with yellow, then working upwards in terms of difficulty to orange, blue, red, and then black. So saving the hardest climbs for last. I stayed on my usual orange climbs, with some attempts at blues. We both had some climbs that we’re really happy with.

But eventually, the day must end, and we must say our final farewell to the Fontainebleau Forest and all of the wonderful feats and challenges it has given us. 

After experiencing it firsthand, it’s no wonder it’s a bouldering Mecca. Each crag had its own uniqueness and there were just so many climbs to try, true jungle gyms. We will sorely miss these rocks. 

And our last evening is spent with a couple of glasses of wine aaaand Italian food. The pasta is just too good. But we had some French wine! Our waiter had asked if we had been to the restaurant before, which we had, but also said our last day was tomorrow as we head back to America. He instantly lit up, exclaiming he loves America and has a dream of driving Route 66. It was so fun to hear the romanticism he had for something in our own country, after we just spent a week romanticizing practically everything in his. 

We take our final walk back from the city centre to our Airbnb. This was the first trip we’ve taken where we stayed at a single location for the entire time, and it has created a deeper relationship with that location. We’ve seen the workers at the local boulangerie many times, the morning and evening rush, people running to the train, and even have had to move our car for neighborhood tree trimming. We’re walking away having felt like we moved to Fontainebleau, if only for a week and a half, we so appreciated how it became our home. We already are talking about how we’ll need to take a trip back.