Five Things We're Changing About How We Guide in Fontainebleau

We've spent the last six weeks watching Fontainebleau from the outside — checking prefecture bulletins, rerouting trips, writing updates for you. Now that 80% of the massif is open again, we could just pick up where we left off in June. We're not going to.

Here's why, and what we're actually changing.

1. The forest was already showing strain before a single spark hit it

It's tempting to treat this as a fire story: something rare and destructive happened, and once it's cleaned up, things go back to how they were. But local conservation voices in the Fontainebleau climbing community were already pushing back on how the massif gets used months before July - flagging worn-out sectors, chalk-caked boulders, and social trails spreading through the undergrowth like cracks in glass. The fire didn't create that pressure. It just made it impossible to pretend it wasn't there.

That's the part we want to sit with, rather than skip past on the way to "here's how to be a good climber." Reopening this forest to the same habits that were already wearing it down before summer feels like the wrong lesson to take from a month of closure.

2. What we saw guiding here for years, honestly

We won't pretend we're neutral observers. We've guided groups through these boulders for years, and if we're being straight with you: not everyone treats this place like the singular, irreplaceable landscape it is. Pads get dropped and dragged instead of carried. People skip wiping their shoes before a problem. Music blasting from speakers, big groups shouting and cheering. And chalk - that's the one nobody wants to talk about, because it's basically become a habit nobody questions.

For what it's worth, the actual guidance from France's climbing federation isn't "ban it" or "there's a chalk limit," despite what you might have read online (both claims are wrong, incidentally - Fontainebleau has neither). It's closer to: use enough to climb, not so much that you're coating the rock. Past a certain point, thick chalk buildup doesn't even help your grip anymore - it just sits there, slowly caking over the sandstone's natural texture underneath it.

Modern chalk is much better performance wise but some people use it as it were still 90's and quantity meant quality. If your skin is gone, no amount of chalk will solve your sweaty hands so just take a rest day. If you drink into the night you sweat more. If you don't get enough sleep you sweat more. If you climb at full sun in May, you sweat more...

3. Post-fire, the ground doesn't forgive mistakes the way it used to

Before the fires, careless footwork or an extra scramble off-trail was a bad habit. Now, in the areas near burn zones, it can be genuinely dangerous - not just to the forest, but to you. Burned sandstone is compromised well below what you can see on the surface, and destabilized soil has already caused real structural failures: at Cuvier Châtillon and around the Éléphant boulder at Larchant, teams have had to build stone retaining walls just to keep sandy ground from giving way and toppling blocks that the fire itself didn't touch.

That's not abstract. That's the actual condition of the ground you'll be standing on this autumn on in some sectors.

4. Everyone's about to pile into the same handful of spots

Here's the part nobody's really talking about yet: with Trois-Pignons and large burned zones still off-limits, climbers are going to funnel hard into whatever's left standing — Franchard Isatis and Cuisinière, Rocher Canon, Élephant and other Larchant areas, the untouched parts of Apremont, Bourron-Marlotte, the northern edges of Trois-Pignons. All reasonable choices individually. Collectively, it's a lot of feet concentrated on a much smaller footprint than usual, at exactly the moment the forest has the least resilience to absorb it.

We're planning our own autumn routing with that in mind - spreading groups across more sectors rather than defaulting to the obvious open ones, even if that means slightly less convenient logistics for us.

5. Recovery is measured in years, not a reopening date

It's worth being honest about the timeline here too: even with real investment, meaningful ecological recovery in burned areas takes three to five years before nature genuinely starts reclaiming the ground - and that's the optimistic case, assuming the restoration work and trail management actually get funded properly, which hasn't always been true here historically. A reopening announcement is a legal status, not an ecological one.

What this actually means for our trips

We've built a donation into our autumn Fontainebleau pricing that goes toward restoration - we covered that in an earlier post. But money alone doesn't fix habits, so here's what we're actually briefing every group on this season (and all the previous ones by the way):

• Carry pads across sand and soil; don't drag them

• Wipe shoes before every problem, every time

• Brush chalk off holds at the end of a session instead of adding more on top next time

• Stay strictly on marked trails, even where a "shortcut" looks obviously fine

• Treat every closure sign as real, even the ones that seem overly cautious

• Wet rock means a gym day. Fine sandstone is extremely fragile when wet. Don't destroy classics just because you're impatient.

• Respect wild animals, many of them were forced out of their natural habitats by the fire and they have less space to live in. This means you should be quiet throughout your forest visit and out of the forest by dusk. This means no music and no night sessions.

None of this makes climbing here harder. It just means treating six weeks of closure as something worth learning from, not just waiting out.