English man in Font

Fontainebleau, as many of you know, holds a special place in my heart. It’s perhaps the one bouldering area in the world where I always feel good and sometimes it takes me by surprise. I remember my first trip to font many years ago with a very young James and a very benevolent Neil. We went hoping for some 8A’s and we left with 1 7A. In reality this came from a real misunderstanding of our own ability rather than a discrepancy between grading. We were young, naive, but we had great fun. The seed was planted during that trip and every year since I have been to font for at least 1 week (and sometimes a lot longer!).

Earlier this year I was in Font with perhaps the best climber I know and at the beginning I really wondered how it would unfold. I didn’t know if Tyler would find his chi and crush everything in his path, or if he would struggle with the style, conditions, and abundance of fresh pain au chocolat. After the first day it was clear that perhaps something special was on the cards, and after the first week it was all but confirmed. The following weeks brought hard ascent after hard ascent, and whilst I stood on in dismay I was also running as fast as I could trying to not so much keep up as be inspired.

When success is all around it drips into you and it pulls you upwards, allowing your imagination to run wild and sometimes your body blindly follows. This was how it was for me spending those weeks with Tyler in Fontainebleau. Nothing seemed impossible, only difficult. Although, for Tyler it seemed as though nothing seemed difficult, only mildly challenging. We quested around a lot of areas as I showed Tyler what I consider to be the best of bleau, and he mopped it all up. Some problems were added to the list and some were inevitably erased, but the result is a whole host of 5 star problems.

We tread the well beaten path and we also cut our own path through the ferns, searching out the hidden gems, some of which can often lie in plain sight. What’s that about wood and trees? Well, Fontainebleau certainly has a lot of both! What outsiders perhaps don’t appreciate is the breadth and depth of what Fontainebleau can offer, from the first timer doing their first yellow to perhaps the best boulderer in the world doing every extreme problem in succession.

This film will hopefully represent the very best of Fontainebleau. The classics, the hidden gems, the hardest, and the most beautiful. There is footage of a great number of hard problems, some of which have never been seen on film, so I expect that everybody will see a problem that they either don’t know or have never seen climbed. Once again, the bottom line will hopefully be inspiration. Inspiration to go climbing, to visit font, and to have fun in pursuit of what we’ve all chosen to make a big part of our lives. If it manages to do that then it’s measured as a success in my book.

Here is the first teaser, and more will follow in the next weeks, so sleep with one eye open. Enjoy. Be inspired. Be Excellent.

[click through to vimeo to watch it in HD]

Teaser 1 from unclesomebody on Vimeo.