Fontainebleau Boulder: The Man Who Lets the Boulders Speak
For six years, Fontainebleau Boulder has photographed the forest’s sandstone blocks without the people climbing them. Behind the Instagram account is Simon Senet, a thirtysomething who decided to put chasing grades aside and dig through archives, track down first ascensionists, and tell the stories that grades leave out. After this summer’s wildfires, his work preserving those stories suddenly took on a new meaning.
At Vertige Media, tucked under the rooftops, rain can sometimes drown out conversation. So when the storm gets loud, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Simon Senet turns around to show us the large photo printed on the back of his T-shirt. A chunk of sandstone fills almost the entire image. Off to the side are the problem’s name, grade, and location. There is no climber.
In a few seconds and one turn of his body, the thirtysomething has summed up the idea behind the project whose name is stitched across his chest: “Fontainebleau Boulder.”
Simon is pleased with this homemade run of shirts. But not, apparently, as pleased as he is with a photo he eventually finds on his phone. In it, three framed prints of his photographs hang above a couch. “A German family sent me this photo of their living room,” he says, looking at the screen. “I think that’s crazy.” What is even crazier is that some of those photographs have now become valuable records. Since then, several wildfires have swept across roughly 5,000 acres of the Fontainebleau forest, more than 10 percent of the massif. The fires left behind heat-reddened boulders, blackened ground, and places that looked completely dead.
In early July 2026, one week before the first fires, Simon Senet happened to be photographing iconic areas including Roche-aux-Sabots and Cul-du-Chien.
“Maybe the landscape I captured then is something we won’t see that way again in our lifetime,” Simon says, running a hand over his shaved head. Then the thought hits him.
“Actually, this whole archive project means even more now.”
V6 Isn’t the Point
Nothing about Simon’s background pointed toward him becoming Fontainebleau’s amateur archivist. He grew up near Saint-Omer in northern France, with a farmer for a grandfather and a racehorse trainer for a father. “I was outside all the time, but not in the forest,” he says. “It wasn’t the mountains. There weren’t any rocks.” Climbing came about a decade later. Simon was playing rugby and attending business school when he met a climber at a party. The next day, he walked into Block’Out’s first climbing gym in Cergy, outside Paris, thinking climbing might help him become a little more explosive on the rugby field.
Three or four sessions were enough to blow up that plan. “It was all I wanted to do,” he says. “I was supposed to become vice president of my rugby club. I dropped everything and went all in on climbing.”
“You do an orange circuit, and by the end of the day you’ve climbed 40 problems. You’ve had this incredible adventure. I think that’s one of the things that really defines Fontainebleau, and you can’t find it anywhere else.”
In Paris, his new climbing friends quickly took him to “Bleau,” as climbers call Fontainebleau. His first trip was to Roche-aux-Sabots, where he climbed an orange circuit, one of Fontainebleau’s color-coded sequences linking dozens of boulder problems at roughly the same difficulty. That same day, the group headed over to Le Toit du Cul-du-Chien, a V6 (7A Font) and one of the forest’s classics. Simon had barely started climbing, and he quickly realized this was not necessarily how he wanted to discover Fontainebleau. The V6 itself was not the problem. What bothered him was the idea that the forest could be reduced to a checklist of hard problems
So he bought a small crash pad and started coming back alone to climb circuits. His relationship with the place changed. He walked. He climbed. He searched for the next painted arrow. He moved through an entire area instead of staying planted beneath a single problem. “You’re alone in the forest and all you hear are the birds,” he says from an armchair in the Vertige Media office. “You feel really small, but it’s magical.” His hands start moving as he talks, weighing two ideas in front of him. On one side, there is the problem you come to work. On the other, the walk between boulders, the landscape, the smells, the feeling of the wind. He is not trying to pit one pleasure against the other. But one of them, he believes, has come to dominate the way climbing is represented. “You do an orange circuit, and by the end of the day you’ve climbed 40 problems. You’ve had this incredible adventure. I think that’s one of the things that really defines Fontainebleau, and you can’t find it anywhere else.”
“Raising awareness isn’t just putting out a message with bullet points: do this, don’t do that,” he says. “You have to show people why it matters.”
The circuits revealed another side of the forest to Simon. One day near Barbizon, he was climbing alone when he met an old-timer walking his dog. Simon was struggling. The man gave him a few tips and stayed to chat. He told him about a problem, a circuit, the climbers who had come before them. Over time, Simon began to realize that Fontainebleau had another history scattered across its rocks: the first V3, the first V6, the first V11, but also thousands of problems named by the people who first established them.
Kundera, a Poster, and Talking Rocks
Le Toit du Cul-du-Chien. Délivrance. Miséricorde. Vague Patatras. L’Insoutenable Légèreté de l’Être—The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Behind those names there may be a joke, a cultural reference, a memory, or simply a mood. A grade tells you how hard a problem is. A name can tell you everything else. That is exactly what interests Simon Senet. The historical books he reads often tell the story of Fontainebleau through its connection to mountaineering, when climbers used the sandstone as a training ground before heading to the mountains. Simon is interested in the smaller stories. “I really wanted the first ascensionists, the people who went out and found these problems, to tell their stories so we wouldn’t lose that cultural history,” he says.
Fontainebleau Boulder grew out of that impulse and a photography project. Even now, everything starts with an image. Light in the forest can be unforgiving. The contrast is harsh, shadows move quickly, and the right light may last only a few minutes. Simon sometimes comes back four or five times before getting the photograph he wants. Only after he has the image does the investigation begin: finding a name, tracing the history of a circuit, digging through old guidebooks, calling a first ascensionist who might know someone else.
Over six years, roughly 600 different problems have passed in front of his camera. Some appear more than once because he has taken a better photograph or learned more of their story. And as always, no one is climbing them. It is the account’s most obvious choice. On a social platform packed with bodies, sends, falls, and grades, Simon removes the climber from the frame. “I wanted to stick with this idea of the bare boulder—no climbing, no performance,” he says. “I’m pushing back a little against Instagram, which is very focused on ego and performance. The idea was to make room for the rocks, the forest, the beauty.”
That choice goes beyond aesthetics. Over the past 20 years, climbing gyms have brought new people into bouldering. Social media has made certain lines famous around the world. Grades provide a simple language for choosing goals. Simon himself remembers the influence of Bleau.info’s “100 Best 7As” poster in the early 2000s. Bleau.info is a major reference site for climbing in Fontainebleau, and the poster offered climbers a list of problems to check off. In Simon’s view, it helped turn V6 into a kind of holy grail.
“We keep repeating these messages to one another and convince ourselves they’re reaching everyone, but we’re probably reaching less than 5 percent of visitors.”
Learning to Care
That does not mean Simon longs for some lost version of the forest. He came to climbing through a commercial gym himself. He pays attention to grades and projects hard problems.
But he also sees what that dominant way of experiencing Fontainebleau can leave out: historic circuits, easier problems, less famous areas, and more broadly, everything a string of numbers cannot tell you. Fontainebleau Boulder grew out of that blind spot. The climbers disappear from the photographs, but their stories return in the captions. The approach has found an audience. The account now has more than 16,000 followers, and according to Simon, nearly 70 percent live outside France. Posts are therefore published in both French and English. That international following is hardly surprising in a forest that has become a global bouldering destination. According to a 2023 study by France’s National Forests Office, or ONF, climbing accounts for roughly 3 million visits to Fontainebleau each year, up from 2 million in 2016, out of about 15 million total visits. That growing traffic gives Simon’s project another purpose. For him, telling the forest’s story can also help teach people how to move through it without leaving too much of a mark.
The young archivist talks about chalk, erosion, not dragging crash pads across the ground, and avoiding cigarettes in the forest. But he is wary of turning stewardship into a list of rules. When the subject comes up, his hands start moving again with every point he makes. When he really wants to drive one home, his blue eyes lock on ours. “Raising awareness isn’t just putting out a message with bullet points: do this, don’t do that,” he says. “You have to show people why it matters.”
That is the core of his argument. Knowing how old a circuit is, learning the story of a problem, or understanding how fragile an environment can be may do more to change behavior than another rule. “By understanding the historical, natural, and cultural heritage of the forest, you can help climbers understand that they have an impact and make them want to reduce it,” he says. Simon talks about positive education and kindness. In other words, the goal is not so much to tell climbers off as to give them a way into a shared history.
« En martelant nos messages entre nous, on est persuadés qu'ils touchent tout le monde, mais on doit toucher moins de 5 % des visiteurs »
That thinking led him to get involved with Respect Bleau, an organization that promotes sustainable bouldering in Fontainebleau, shares best practices, and helps protect climbing areas. Simon suggested rebuilding its communication around three verbs: “Learn, Share, Care.” “It sounds better in English: learn, share, care,” says Simon, who spent a fair amount of time abroad before settling near the forest. The former business-school student even talks about “conversion.” But what he really means is this: “How many people saw the message? How many understood it? How many will actually change something on their next trip?” he asks. “We keep repeating these messages to one another and convince ourselves they’re reaching everyone, but we’re probably reaching less than 5 percent of visitors.”
The July wildfires did not create this line of thinking. They simply changed its scale. After roughly 5,000 acres burned in a matter of days, Simon Senet admits that the everyday efforts climbers make can seem insignificant. Still, on the first weekend after the forest reopened, he went back. He went to climb, but also just to walk. He found his friends, the boulders, and a feeling that many people had rediscovered: “how lucky we are to have this forest, this playground, this nature right next to Paris.” The fires did not turn Fontainebleau Boulder into a conservation project. They confirmed something Simon already believed: we may be more likely to protect a place once we have learned how to really see it.
And to care about it.
