Trois-Pignons Won't Be Back Anytime Soon — And What We're Doing About It

Published July 28, 2026 - updated July 31, 2026

We've been tracking the Fontainebleau fire closures closely for you all month, and there's an update that changes the picture for one part of the massif in particular: Trois-Pignons.

The short-term closure dates keep moving — the general order covering Fontainebleau and la Commanderie has now been extended twice, first from July 26 to July 31, and just this week again to August 7, 2026. It's also widened to include the forêt domaniale de Nanteau-Poligny and the forêt communale de Nemours (which covers Petit Bois, Rocher Gréau, and Les Mammouths — see our other post for the correction on that). But Trois-Pignons isn't operating on the same clock as the rest. It's a different situation entirely.

Bois Rond won't be the same again :(

Why Trois-Pignons is different

The fire that tore through roughly 2,000 hectares of the massif hit Trois-Pignons hardest — the Noisy-sur-École sector alone accounted for around 1,500 of those hectares. And the damage isn't the kind that clears up once the flames are out.

A few things make this closure long-term rather than short-term:

- The trees are structurally compromised, not just scorched. Many are still green at the crown but dead at the trunk and root system — meaning they're standing, but unstable, and expected to start collapsing over the next two years.

- Peat fires are still smoldering underground. The forest floor in parts of Trois-Pignons burns as "tourbe" (peat) rather than surface litter, and that kind of fire can persist for months, invisible from above.

- The ONF has said publicly this will take at least a year — likely more. Full replanting isn't in the plan; it'll be partial, covering only select parcels rather than the roughly 2,000 burned hectares.

In short: the Trois-Pignons we've all climbed in for years is, in its current form, probably not coming back. What eventually reopens will be a different forest — thinner, replanted in patches, and shaped by whatever the ONF decides is safe and sustainable going forward.

What this means for planning

If you had circuits or sectors in Trois-Pignons on your radar for this autumn — this is the moment to mentally set those aside for the season, and likely for next year too. We'll keep steering our own trips toward sectors that are structurally unaffected and outside the closure perimeter (Buthiers, Puiselet, the Nemours-area sectors, and the Orsay satellites all remain accessible, as we covered in our last post).

Giving something back: our autumn trip donation scheme

Sitting with this news, we didn't just want to route people around Trois-Pignons and move on — this forest gave us and thousands of other climbers a lot over the years, and its restoration is going to take real money and real time.

So starting with our autumn trips this year, Climbingbus will build a small fixed contribution directly into the trip price — not an optional add-on people have to remember to tick, but baked in by default, with the option to opt out for anyone who'd rather not participate. We'll pool those contributions and forward them as a lump sum to the restoration effort (the Fondation du patrimoine's national collection, which has already raised close to €860,000 from about 6,000 donors, looks like the right channel — though we'll confirm the exact recipient before launch).

The idea is simple: if you're coming to climb in a forest that's actively recovering from this, a small part of what you pay goes toward helping it recover. We'll publish the exact amount and where it's going before autumn bookings open, along with a running total of what the trips have contributed.

More details soon — for now, if you've got trips booked for the fall, know that Trois-Pignons is off the table, but there's plenty of forest left to climb, and now a small way to help the part that isn't.