Bouldering In Thin Air - Unexplored Chamonix Blocs

Come on! Hello and welcome to Climbing Daily. Now most people come to Chamonix for the alpine climbing, big rock routes and yeah sure there's some bouldering kind of dotted around but what the rest of the world doesn't know, until now, is there are some world class bouldering locations nestled in the mountains. There's been a dedicated team of guys who have been up here cleaning, mapping out everything right on the topo and over the next couple of days we're going to be spending some time with them and checking it all out. Look, purely in terms of research, I've got to give it a go. I mean I can't just come up here and watch these people do it. That'd be rude. I'm Jonny Baker and I've been living in Chamonix for about 7 or 8 years. Mainly for summers, not for winters. And I do building projects. Developing started mainly with Matt Perrier. Matt is the most prolific sight boulder in the whole entire world. So wherever he will be in the world, he will find boulders. Whether it be in the desert, in the mountains, he'll find them. And he's found some really cool boulders here. My name's Matt. I've been here in the valley for a little over 10 years. Arrived here for the joy of the climbing and still here enjoying the climbing after all this time. I started developing the bouldering here predominantly because we were running out of boulder problems to do and what I was seeing all around me seemed like a vast untouched potential of climbing and so we started getting stuck in. I reckon Hug has cleaned up the climb between us. Probably a good few hundred problems. Hug finds all these boulders dotted around my place on running or just hiking, whatever random missions he does. Comes back, gets sight, tells us about it and often maybe you can't find him, we can't get back to him or whatever. It's like, ----, we need to actually document these things and actually get other people out. Problem is, sectors like here, where it's kind of mossy and a bit dirty, we need people to keep coming, keep off the moss, keep the sight and we love getting a team out and just having a good time. So what's a better way than getting a cool topo, a modern topo, good pictures, telling people what's out there so they can come and play and have a nice time. After our initial panics of how to do this properly to start with and the grand scale of what we were looking at, our grand mission is to produce a full paperback topo of the entire Chamonix Valley. But this, in reality, is still probably two years. So for now, we're bringing out the new areas we're developing in sector by sector. We hope by the kickstart of it, we're about to launch. Through this, we're giving donations. We'll send you exclusive copies of the PDFs as they come out. If you give us 10 bucks, we'll send you the new topo for the Plan d'Agrouille, which we keep hoping will be finished very, very, very soon. The next in progress is up here, where we are today, on the Possettes. And we've got new sectors in Valaisine, around La Bouée in the Berard Valley, a lot of new bouldering in Argentière, to mention but a few. So, yeah, we hope that if we can convince you guys to help us out this way, you can find it all on the Kickstarter, which is ChamonixBloc. Check it all out there. It goes live in a few days. So we've come up the hill to another boulder and to what can only be described as this king line, this overhanging arete with a huge high ending. It's not super difficult, but that last move is scary. See if anyone can do it. So the line didn't go down this evening. The guys are still trying it, but we're losing the light, so we're going to have to head off. If you guys want to come and try the Chamonix bouldering, it is incredible. Forget about the big mountains. Come for a boulder. Tomorrow we're heading off with Hazel Finlay to discover a new area, so stay tuned for that. Thanks for watching. See you soon. I'm going to go back climbing. Forget that. Rhys just did it. Right, so there you go. A pretty end. A good end to a great day. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon. Hello and welcome to Climbing Daily. Today is part two of our Hidden Chamonix bouldering series, and we've got loads of bouldering mats, a crew of strong climbers, and Hazel Finlay, and we're heading up to the Midi Plan to go bouldering. This is the best day ever. So we've just come up the midi lift with four massive pads, which has got to be one of the funniest experiences I've had on the midi. Guys, just tell me a bit about where we are and what this area is like. Cool, so right now we're up at the Plan de Aguil, which is the midway station up to the Aguil de Midi, so about 15 minutes from the centre of Chamonix. And right now, as you can see, we are surrounded by perfect granite boulders. And just down and right in this little valley, down underneath the cables, is where we're going to go. As far as we know, hardly any people have bouldered down here, and I think one of the reasons for that is compared to the mountains, the boulders look tiny. They look like just, you know, two metre high, one metre high, something like that. And then you get down there and you realise they're actually monsters, and it's perfect granite. So I feel like we've uncovered a bit of a goldmine here, really. Awesome. Well, enough talk. I want to go climbing. Let's do it. So we're just having a look at the topo, deciding which ones to go to. So the guys have made this topo up, and everything you see here is all their hard work. So we're deciding which boulders to go to, getting all the stuff out, and then just going climbing, really. So, Matt, just talk me through this boulder we're warming up on, starting today. So, ironically, from where we are here on the right, this is the lowest boulder in our sector we've got here that we've developed. As you can see, there's a few more for us to go at. Just on the right, some warm-ups. Behind us here, just in front of us here, a few projects that are awaiting some very strong fingers to get themselves up here. Beautiful, real, kind of like the Brad Pitt of the Plain d'Agri there, I think she is. And then around to the left here, another beautiful yet unclimbed wall. Is this a rat someone's come up? Up this wall into the rib, yeah, it climbs out right. And then further around here, this beautiful line, still awaiting, we did a couple of years ago, still awaiting a sit start. Amazing, beautiful compression, a rat finishing on the slab above. And then around on this other side here, this left, a rat climbs as well. We'll have to get someone to give us a demonstration of that later. This is bonkers, I can see the lift, like we're ten minutes from the lift. Yeah, it's been this whole part of a strange journey, in the whole valley really, as we were saying the other day up on the Possets, it's right next to the path and here as well. When we first started coming up here, it was quite funny with the lifties, they're looking at us going, like, where you lot going? Right down there, mate, massive boulders. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I think it just gets belittled, doesn't it? It's so easy to look across what's there and look at these big glorious bastards behind them, but actually there's a whole playground. Well, I mean, thank God no one found it first, otherwise we'd have nothing to do, would we? They know now. I know, we've ruined it, haven't we? We've ruined it. You'd better enjoy it. This idea of bouldering at the Plain d'Aiguille has been talked about for a while. You know, we'd come up here to go alpine climbing or to do the rock climbs above, and we'd always look down and go, God, I wonder what those boulders are like. And I always thought, you know, if the boulders are anything like the granite roots, then they're probably going to be really good, but for some reason it just never happened. Until one day, I guess, the motivation gets big enough, you talk about it long enough, and, yeah, it happens. People get up here and start scrubbing boulders. Come on. Go again. Nice. Come on, mate. Up and left. Awesome. Crunchy. Extra pressure. You got it, yeah. Really good. Awesome. Cool. First flash, yeah. Now, when you flashed that, I kind of thought it might be easier, but then everyone else had fallen off. Mate, what a nice one. Yeah, a bit of a surprise, really. That first move felt pretty desperate, and I was totally ready to fall off. Because I saw you adjust on it, I was like, ah, maybe it's a bit greasy. Before your shoulders come out, and you're like, oh, no, this is it. I'm going down. Maybe I've just greased it up for everyone else. Yeah, I think that's it, yeah. So, up here, you kind of have everything. You've got easy slabs to easy boulders to stuff that we haven't climbed yet, and we really want some stronger climbers to come here and finish these projects for us, because they're these beautiful, proud lions, but as a group, there's just no one strong enough to tick them yet. So there's really everything. I mean, the only thing is that a lot of the boulders, it's not super condensed. You walk in a little bit. It's difficult to pick out what's good and what's not, which is why we want to make a topo. Johnny has kindly stepped up to that challenge, and I think he is enjoying it, but he doesn't necessarily have the time, so it's happening really slowly. He's basically completed the Plain d'Agouis area, and now he's kind of moving on to the other areas. To help get the topo off the ground, we're launching a Kickstarter. So, yeah, I mean, if you enjoy what you've seen in this film today, then follow the link on the bottom.