|| Cooling off, damp || Prime lime time ||

|| Focus On... ||

Font Dispatches

The creeping gentrification of the A1 south of Worksop is felt keenly when you only make that drive once a year. Each summer I swear I clock one fewer dodgy looking truckers’ portacabin-based eateries, and one more Dubai chocolate smash burger outlet (note: I have no idea what these words actually mean). Call it progress but it’ll be a sad day when that former Little Chef which is currently an “adult shop” gets turned into a Starbucks, and you’ll be no closer to actually obtaining a drinkable coffee there either.

As we head south I watch the eccentric array of roadside establishments in this part of the world fly past the car window to an equally quirky soundtrack; the new Pulp album. A release that none of us knew we needed, but it does provide a much-needed alternative to the hysteria sweeping half the country regarding a certain Manchester-based Beatles tribute act. But back on the right side of the Pennine rain shadow, the Pulp LP surprisingly provided the ideal optimistic and upbeat soundtrack to a Font road trip and summer escape. We’re all getting older, but Jarvis is sounding better than ever; the Ben Moon of Britpop? Maybe everything will be alright.

And it WAS alright. The sun shone, the pastries were abundant, the temps were high, the little bottles of cheap domestic lagers were cool, and the rock was dry. Good times.

I forget which year I first went to Font - it was either 2000 or 2001 - but I’ve got about a quarter of a century of visits under my belt, and yet still there’s things to learn, things to discover, new things to see, new places to go. I’ve found that a good catalyst for visiting different places is just to stay somewhere different. Having driven 500 miles to get there - which is not trivial, speaking as someone recovering from a slipped disc - I want to spend as little time in the car as possible once we’re here, so inevitably the location of the gite shapes how the rest of the trip pans out in terms of venues. So on this trip we were based in La-Chapelle-La-Reine, hence all the crags up north are out - no Cuvier, no Apremont, no Rocher Canon etc etc. Instead I’ve visited a few new places, and reappraised a couple of old ones.

The Buthiers areas have never really lit my fire before. Back in the pre-kids days of big trips with a group of mates, Buthiers always tended to feel like a long way out of the way, with a lot of big intimidating lines. I don’t mind doing the odd highball but we tend to spend a lot of time doing that on grit, so I don’t always necessarily want to be getting gripped on holiday too - a change is nice! Buthiers is also lacking a lot of the nice forest ambience what with the crags being awkwardly located right next to a leisure centre and carpark. However, as I discovered on an early morning visit with MiniDave#2 this trip, there’s actually a really nice and fairly chill set of circuit problems at the west-most end of Buthiers Piscine, and although some of it is literally right by the fence of the swimming complex it’s a nice spot, with a decent bit of shade and some real quality climbing on the oranges and blues, with a separate yellow circuit (which is more like a sort of older kids circuit - probably ideal for 8-10yr olds).

Buthiers Nord was somewhere I had never visited before, but was spurred on by its inclusion in Stephan Denys’ Bleau Blocs book. Honestly, it’s not a top tier Font venue, or even a second tier crag. In the lefthand cave in particular there’s some very soft and suspect rock lower down with some footholds that are inevitably destined to go “full Vienna” (Bowden aficionados will know what I mean) and a few of the lines on the right are perhaps making the most of the rock rather than taking the lines of least resistance, BUT it is a very shady north-facing escarpment, 2 mins walk from the car, and probably stays wet a lot in winter, making it worth a look in summer.

Another new one to me was Mont Aigu. This has long been on my radar as having a kids circuit, but back when our kids were younger this was one of the few I never checked out. Perhaps it was the slightly longer walk that did it, or the fact it lacks a well-known destination problem in the low 7s? But either way it passed us by. But this year we checked it out for the yellow, orange and blue circuits. All really good climbing, good landings, nothing too epic, with some interesting history re the big Denecourt engraving, and a few good spots to base yourself for a family picnic with a high density of problems. I still didn’t really find a nice steep summer 7 to get on, but still, it’s a quality venue which I imagine I’ll be exploring further in future.

Finally, although I’ve been to one of the outlying Boissy areas a few years ago, I never got around to sussing out the ‘main’ Boissy stuff centred around the village of Boissy-aux-Cailles itself. I had high hopes for the church there being photogenic, which were dashed to find it surrounded by some building works and temporary fencing, but the village does sport a good fun fitness trail thing which allowed the kids to burn off some pastries one evening. Although lacking any circuits, it does have a summer ace up its hot weather sleeve in a little steep cave-type wall in a boulder jumble, home to Bégnots Story and Water Roof. If you do your due diligence on these and watch a few videos they tend to look a bit cramped and cluttered, especially if someone has tried to fill the cave with pads and cover every exposed rock in the landings. Bégnots Story in particular is a bit cramped and dabby on the right at the finish, but I thought Water Roof was actually pretty good, better than it looks in videos certainly. Grit climbers will also feel at home here due to a rare appearance in these parts of pebbles in the rock. It’s kind of like they collected all the pebble allocation for the entire Font area and deposited them in one spot - incredible to think their presence here might well be accounted for by a single flooding event, or similar, 30 million years ago.

For the middle-aged parents out there on blazingly hot summer Font trips, I’ve put a no-effort-expended video of a few of these places and/or problems here:

Every day in Font is a school-day of some sort, so did we learn anything this year? One thing that struck me particularly this year, having spoken to a few people beforehand about potential problems to try in the warm, is there’s a big difference between the sort of shady problem you might try on a warm day at Easter or in Autumn, and the sort of shade you need in summer. So, a shady problem at an otherwise boiling hot crag doesn’t really work very well in summer. An example of this is Le Plafond at Dame Jouanne; a roof problem climbed entirely on the underside of a big boulder. Great climbing within the remit of this particular style, and it doesn’t get the sun, obviously. However, the entire crag is an absolute sun-trap, with glaringly bright white rock reflecting the sun's rays in all directions. Hence when I turned up at 7:30am to try this roof the ambient temperature at the crag was fairly cool, but under the roof it felt like the ground had retained a lot of the previous day’s heat, making it hotter under there than outside the cave. Still doable though, if not ideal!

Other lessons learned, in no particular order: Those cases of the cheapest own-brand Lidl beers are very drinkable, proving the theory even the most generic supermarket lager tastes 300% better outside of UK soil. The Pizza place at La-Chappelle-La-Reine is great and does 2-for-1 most days, and their “French Barbecue” pizza sports so much meat I don’t know how they are not making a loss on those. If your gite beds only have those weird French floppy square pillows or the weird French long sausage-shaped pillows, then the latter is probably the least worst option of the two. The centre of Nemours town is surprisingly picturesque, although the Lidl there doesn’t sell proper milk, only UHT, so you have to take the rough with the smooth. Although to be fair UHT might work as a cheap alternative to that expensive premium-brand alcohol-free liquid chalk stuff, and be about as effective. You can put the money you saved there towards that new Pulp record - you’re welcome.

|| Exposure Festival ||

Off the back of last year's successful inaugural instalment, Exposure Festival is back this year in September. Pencil it in your calendar for the weekend of 19-21st - looks like there'll be some great stuff going on again. I'll be running a couple of workshops as part of this, so keep your eyes on the Instagram account for updates in the coming weeks.