Buoux: Revisiting France's Crag of the 1980s

Once upon a time in Europe — and perhaps this is still true today — the most gifted climbers battled for one crown: to climb a route that no other could repeat. In that age of dreaming, beginning in the early 1980s, the rules that had defined the sport were cast happily and carelessly to the wind. No longer was a climber required to lower after each failed attempt, or to only install fixed protection from the ground up. French climbers dreamt of the impossible, and they developed a science to help them achieve wild new routes. The place they went to test their crazy ideas was a cliff called Buoux, aka, the Laboratory.

Buoux sits near the ancient village (population: 125) of the same name in Provence, in southern France. There, sunny, 300-foot walls of limestone-coated Molasse sandstone line the little Aiguebrun valley’s northern flank. The climbing style is sometimes elegant, with precise poking of shallow pockets with toes and fingertips on vertical faces, and sometimes brutal, with violent throws between sharper, deeper pockets on severely overhanging walls. With blue and orange buttresses jutting from a pastoral landscape and a gurgling brook at the base, the setting could not be more enchanting.

If Buoux was a laboratory, then certainly its two maddest scientists were the Parisian brothers Marc and Antoine Le Menestrel. Marc was a climber of such talent that in 1983, aged 15, he established Reve d’un Papilon (8a/5.13b), matching the top difficulty of the era. His older brother, not to be outdone, soon climbed Chouca (8a+/5.13c), a 90-foot route on a futuristic swell, featuring long reaches between distant pockets. One reach move was so difficult it later inspired a new technique — the figure four — employed by the visiting American Darius Azin. In 1986, Antoine applied his “artistic” talents to his masterpiece La Rose et la Vampire (8b/5.13d), purposely chiseling the route to require an elegant, twisting, cross-body reach. Today, Antoine’s “Rose move” is part of our everyday lexicon. Antoine Le Menestrel was first and foremost an artist and dancer, and while most will now decry his tactics for creating routes, he was undoubtedly one of the most talented and visionary climbers ever. In 1985, for example, he traveled to England to test his skills, and found nothing that challenged him. His free-solo second ascent of Britain’s then hardest route, Jerry Moffatt’s 40- foot Revelations (8a+) at Raven Tor, remains one of the most outrageous feats of climbing in that decade.