Escalade — Gorges d'Apremont

Apremont is the closest major bouldering sector to Barbizon: you can walk there from the village in under thirty minutes. Pierre Allain opened the Fissure des Alpinistes here in 1933 or 1934, and circuits arrived in the early 1950s, shortly after those at Cuvier. For the nineteenth-century painters these boulders were motifs; for twentieth-century climbers they became playgrounds. The two uses still coexist, in a forest that has been part of UNESCO's Fontainebleau and Gâtinais Biosphere Reserve since 1998.