Saturday 11 September 2021: a very special day for Corinne Gourgeonnet. After 6 years, she completed her quest to find and photograph each and every bordermarker along the French-Spanish border. The last one to do was well chosen: bm311 at Col de Sobe. A touristic train brought her to Lac d’Artouste which left 2 hours […]
Bm602 can’t be reached by foot. This very last bordercross is hidden in a cave at the Mediterranean coast between Portbou and Cerbère. In 2011 we rented a boat with a boatsman to get there and Serge Poncet peddled with a canoe from Cerbère while the mountaineer Lionel Daudet descended along the steep rockwall to the […]
What is the Bidaubus-dispute? We are talking about the esfr-borderline between bm407 and 409, not far from Bagnères-de-Luchon. The dispute has been described in full detail on earlier webpages and blogposts. A starting point could be this post from 2018 and this video: The different views on the borderline between bm407 and 409 : a […]
See for the update-details: https://www.grpdesbf.nl/esfr-html-miscellania-updatelog.html It has been once again challenging and interesting trips in april and september 2023. Among others: with Corinne Gourgeonnet searching for the Croix de Malafrenor and the Bidaubus-crosses, 3-days of backpacking in the increasingly dry Eastern Pyrenees and with Carlos & Conchita Roca their first wild camping experience. Also digesting […]
Jean Marc Dumont was a new and promising star in our field and now he has already reached his zenith: on 4 september he did his very last bordermarker: bm602 (with a kayak). And he did them all astonishingly fast: in 3 years! I already introduced Jean Marc (aka Marko) in the previous post and […]
A tip from Corinne Gourgeonnet: Jean Marc Dumont, a young man of 64 who is also aspiring to do all esfr-markers. He once started as a co-walker along the bordermarkers and now continues on his own with impressive trips on his MTB or by foot. As a former air traffic controller, he retired at an […]
Today I swam to bm602, the last of the esfr-bordermarkers in a cave on the Mediterranean coast. Accessible only by boat or by swimming. I trained this summer in open water swimming and after a failed trial a few days ago, I succeeded today in good weather and a calm sea. And thanks to the […]
This marker is relatively young. It was placed in 1997 after a Spanish engineer had discovered that the borderline between bm420 and 421 was presented wrongly on the maps and didn’t follow the real watershed. See this page for the whole story. At my first visit in 2011, bm420bis was still in perfect health after […]
Pleased to announce a new update of my main site, covering the 11 day trips I did in September 2021. See for the details this page. A lot of information and pictures, it might be a bit too much. If I may suggest two picks: – 6 September: my longest day trip ever in terms […]
The bordercross 436 is a remarkable one: it is almost invisible, engraved high above the ground on this fierce rock. Without paint or chalk, it’s very hard to distinguish cross and number on the rockface. You have to know where to look. I was very lucky in 2010 that cross and number were painted black at […]