Escalade — Cuvier-Châtillon

Cuvier is the historic cradle of bouldering in Fontainebleau. It was at Cuvier-Rempart that Pierre Allain opened the Angle Allain in 1934 before developing the first climbing shoe, and there that Fred Bernick marked the forest's first waymarked circuits in 1947, the red and the yellow. The colour-circuit principle, born here as training for Parisian alpinists, has since spread across the whole forest and far beyond. Climbing here from Barbizon means touching the source of something.