Fontainebleau All Bouldering 28,115 routes in crag

The holy grail of bouldering. Every serious boulderer should visit Fontainebleau at least once in their life. You'll find a beautiful landscape, perfect rock and the need for a wide variety of climbing skills!

Circuits

The thing that makes Fontainebleau unique is the accessibility of the climbing. Kids, beginners, intermediate climbers and even pros will find loads of boulders they can climb on in almost every part of Font.

This is further emphasized by the famous circuits. They work similarly to bouldering gyms, where each color represents a certain grade range. Just like you would walk around the gym and climb routes with the right color for you, you walk around the forest here and climb on boulders marked with a certain color. Each boulder is marked with an arrow, number and sometimes even dots marking footholds to be used. The circuit follows a logical line from start to finish, with the last boulder often being a glorious finish with a nice view. You aren't required to follow the circuit from start to finish, feel free to pick any boulders in any color - usually you will have various colors next to each other, just like in a gym. Read more info on circuits here.

Here on TheCrag each circuit color has a different Area. Even though two boulders can be on the same block, they belong to a different Area since there isn't any better way how to structure them. Some boulders don't belong to any circuit so you can find them in the Off-circuit Area.

Circuits always have two things:

1. Color. In order from easiest to hardest: Yellow, Orange, Blue, Red, Black, White. But white is sometimes used for kids and also various other colors are used occasionally.

2. Abbreviation: PD - easy, AD - advanced, D - hard, TD - very hard, ED - extremely hard. The abbreviations can have a plus or minus sign to further specify the difficulty (PD+ is harder than PD- but still easier than AD-)

Guidebooks

There are many guidebooks for Fontainebleau and you can find them at the sidebar here. Make sure to pick those that cover the sectors, grades and areas you are interested in. Also keep in mind some don't cover traverses.

The challenge with paper guidebooks is they are quickly outdated, since circuits often change, appear, and disappear. That's why it is worth to also use online sources. The app Boolder is amazing for finding boulders, and the best part is that it's free run by volunteers.

Bleau.info is the ultimate database for Fontainebleau with detailed information on each boulder, circuit and sometimes topos.

Topo Bleau has more information on circuits and topos

The area is mainly taken care of by CoSiRoc where you can find some topos as well as recent news

Where to go

With so many options, it's really hard to choose which part of Fontainebleau should you go to climb. It's best to start by considering which factors are important to you: accessibility by public transport when you don't have a car, what grade you climb, whether you prefer safe landings and boulders that aren't too high, if you are bringing kids, if it rained recently and you need a location that is dry, if it's the weekend and you want to avoid crowds... once you consider these, check this article to get some location tips

When to go

You can come at almost any time of the year. Winter and early spring has the advantage of best friction for hard bouldering, but the weather may not be too pleasant. Spring, Summer and Autumn will have worse friction but more enjoyable temperatures and longer days. Also the chances of rain are a bit lower.

Rain

Rain is the worst enemy of climbers in Fontainebleau. When it rains, the sandstone gets wet - it's almost impossible to climb on it and also it gets very fragile. So when the rocks are wet, never climb on them. Bleau Météo is a dedicated weather forecast service run by a climber, which is useful for knowing about expected conditions. Weather Apps such as Windy are also handy when they show the rain radar with approaching rain clouds. Thanks to these you can see it sometimes rained in one sector but not another which is further away.