The Chaîne des Puys: Pariou, La Vache and Lassolas

Required Activities

• Climb the 555 oak steps up the east flank of the Puy de Pariou and walk the full rim of the young crater — an almost perfect circle 200 m wide and 90 m deep — then look west and north for the older crater and its tuff ring set at a different angle underneath it, the reason Pariou is compared to Vesuvius

• Walk up between Puy de la Vache and Puy de Lassolas and see that both cones are open on the south side: the lava came out while the cinders were still falling and carried them away like a conveyor belt, so the craters never closed. Look at the colour of the scoria under your boots — red where the crater heat oxidised it, black where it did not — and follow the chaotic surface of the cheire d'Aydat away to the south-east

• Walk down off the cheire to the lac d'Aydat, in the valley of the Veyre, and work out from the shoreline where the lava that stopped the river came to rest — the same flow dammed the lac de la Cassière to the north