Puy de Dôme

I'm rather tired after a long day, but I wanted to blog about this before I forget all the details :P

I'm in Clermont-Ferrand now for 2 weeks of internship (don't ask for more details), so this morning I went out to town to walk around a bit, and in the afternoon Albin took me to hike the Puy de Dôme. It's a sleeping volcano, the highest peak of a ring of volcanoes in Auvergne (the region where Clermont-Ferrand is situated).

We drove up to an altitude of about 1000m (Albin has a car), parked there and hiked the remaining 400m (roughly) up to the summit. Usually there are buses going up to the top, and we can also drive up, but the road going up was closed to make a new train/cable-car to take people up, so for the moment the buses only go up to where we started hiking.

the beginning of the hike

some way up
(I find that the flowers add a nice touch to the photo :P )

after about 40 minutes (note: I was already tired after 15-20 minutes)
You can see the parking lot from which we walked up...it's on the top-left quarter of the photo.

the view was already pretty good

another view

Only this left to reach the top!

Ten minutes later:

We're arriving! (finally...)

45 minutes? We took an hour to come up...because I had to stop to rest :P

the map of the summit

We came up by the Chemin des Muletiers, and went around the summit before going back down the same way. Col de Ceyssat is where there's the parking lot we drove to.

We turned left upon arriving at the top, going towards Panorama des Combrailles. Then we passed by the "vous êtes ici" star (where I took the photo :P ) and went around the edge of the summit to the other panoramic viewing points.

from the fork in the road just before arriving at the Panorama des Combrailles viewpoint

puy de Côme (the name is thanks to the information plaque at the viewpoint ;) )

from the Panorama des Combrailles viewpoint
(the next two photos were taken from the same place)

the TV/radio antenna at the summit

where we came up (on the right of those brown buildings)

along the way to the next panoramic viewing point

The one with the "red triangle" on it is the Puy de Pariou. That's another volcano that some people climb up, and there's a path going down from it that continues up to Puy de Dôme. Actually the "red triangle" expression comes from someone we overheard. I don't know whether Albin would have used the same expression to point it out to me...

from the Panorama de la chaîne des puys viewpoint

from the Panorama de Clermont-Ferrand viewpoint (do I really need to tell you which town is that? :P )

There was also the ruins of a temple at the summit.




The we went down...we managed it in 35 minutes this time, since we (I) didn't have to stop to rest.

See how high up we were? See the Col de Ceyssat parking lot?

So, all thanks to Albin, I conquered the Puy de Dôme. :D (no way I'm conquering Everest or Kinabalu, so this is good enough, eh? :P )

By the way, while writing this post I discovered that "Puy de Dôme" is the volcano, and "Puy-de-Dôme" is the department. I never knew that there was a difference...