September 23, 2023 - Hervé Gourdel.

Sometimes it's difficult to choose where to go for a climb, so I browsed bleau.info and stumbled upon "Caresseur de Pierre" in Apremont Butte aux Peintres, a problem that I never tried, because I didn't understand it. This time, I decided to give it some time and try to figure it out. When I arrived at the area though, the boulders still felt damp-ish and I feared that I had made the wrong choice. As "Caresseur de Pierre" is located on the other side of the hill, I still had hope for it to be in better conditions. To my luck, it was, but the very bad slopers slopers at the end had to be cleaned again. When I was done cleaning, I soon discovered that the move to slopers was morpho and I didn't seem to get even close to best part of it, so I focused on starting with the sloper and worked out the topout, which was way harder than I had imagined and it took quite a while before I had it figured out and done it separately. It gave me confidence for doing the actual problem when I would miraculously get the sloper when coming from below. I did make progress and finetuned my body position until it suddenly stuck and I was able to top out, albeit not without a struggle on the mantle. This felt more like 7B+ to me in these mediocre conditions.

Fontainebleau - Apremont Butte aux Peintres - Caresseur de Pierre 7B(7B+)

Next up, even though my right elbow was hurting pretty bad due to last week's injury, I moved to the "Psykokwak" boulder, where I wanted to try "Hervé Gourdel".

Hervé Gourdel apparently was a 55 year old French mountain guide when he was kidnapped on September 21, 2014 by the Jund al-Khilafa group in Algeria, which had pledged allegiance to IS. His death was made public by a video three days later, he was beheaded.

The problem "Hervé Gourdel" sitstarts all the way on the right and traverses on very bad slopers to the left to finish in "Psykokwak". While working out the moves, I did a logical standing start with bad slopers, a couple of moves in from the original sitstart, and topped out. As it is a logical standing start, 7B-ish on itself, I decided to keep the video.

Fontainebleau - Apremont Butte aux Peintres - Hervé Gourdel (raccourci) 7B

Coming from the sitstart adds a couple of moves, not very hard, but enough to already loose quite some chalk off my hands, making the next moves on the slopers much more difficult. After a few attempts, I climbed past the crux, and still fell off the very last move as I was too pumped. I took a longer break and finished it right after it.

Fontainebleau - Apremont Butte aux Peintres - Hervé Gourdel 7C(7B+)