Hiking in the Chartreuse: Cirque de St Meme/Le Chateau
This will be a briefer update than usual - a bit of good news for folks who prefer pictures to writing. The Internet connection here is quite intermittent and frustrating, so I'm pretty happy just to have succeeded in uploading photos. Plus, I'm getting behind on my sleep and need to catch up a bit this evening.
So, briefly, it was another terrific day. We were lucky and had near perfect weather for our hiking layover, and took in a pair of fine hikes recommended to us by the tourist office here in the village. Both were great, but the afternoon one was really special. It featured a ruined 14th century castle high on a ridge behind the town, with astonishing views od the surrounding limestone cliffs. Probably not everyone's idea of a rest day though - 7 hours hiking, with about 2500' of often steep climbing. At least we worked some different muscles today so hopefully we'll be rested up a bit for tomorrow afternoon's 3500' climb up into the Vercors, the next region down the road on our itinerary.
First hike of the day - a 6 loop to the double waterfall in Cirque Saint-Meme.
For our second hike we took a late afternoon five mile loop to a ridge high above the village. At the top we found a ruined chateau and a stunning panorama.
Looking up at 520C, the road we biked in on yesterday evening. At the time we were amazed at the depth of this narrow canyon, so we enjoyed looking back up from the bottom.
