May 20, 2007 Me, Cyril, Camille, Sebastien and Arnaud. Altitude: 1298 m Where: 10 minutes ride from home! Time: 9 hours # people met during hike: ZERO!!! Le Neron is the free-standing mass of rock in the middle of this picture.  We did the        entire ridge line from the front (south) to the back (north). Gratuitous paragliding shot of Grenoble that I found on some guy's website, who        crossed from the Vercors almost to Chamonix in 6.5 hours.  Sweet!!! Le Neron is famous for being a steep treed ridge line surrounded completely by cliffs        and directly overlooking Grenoble.  In 2003, the entire summit burnt in a fire that lasted        23 days. Access was impossible, but fortunately because of the cliffs, the fire didn't extend        into Grenoble.  On top of this, there are many many stories of people getting lost on the        summit and doing the whole "ski down the backside of Cypress and get trapped in a        band of cliffs" gong show.  There have been quite a few deaths up there because it's so        close to Grenoble, and people don't realize how exposed it is and that there's no escape        route anywhere.  That said, the summit is now quite a feared destination.  That's why I        decided to do it!  Mooahaha. To access the south side of the ridge, you follow a path carved into the cliff by the        Romans ("these Romans were crazy!  toc toc toc").  There are the remains of an old        Roman guard post on the ridge.  Pretty cool. Once on the ridge, the direction is pretty dead obvious!  Straight up it!        View south with Grenoble and the "Synchrotron" (the big round thing). Following blue markers through the burnt forest on the ridge. Starting to get interesting! Passage du croix de fer. The gang on the summit.  These guys were awesome.  None of them are really         mountainey people, but they were all totally bomber.  And they knew the name         of every single flower and plant we came across, not to mention whether a fox or a         boar had passed by recently or not.  Lots of fun! Cool!!!  Here we had to use the "shimmy along the fence" technique. Don't even ask how we got up there! View of most of the ridge right down to the Synchrotron. Right before the descent, there's a huge cave where some Colonel Brun spent a while        for some reason or other. The descent back into the valley is pretty heinous.  You could almost         crouch up into a ball and roll all the way down.  Fantastic trip!         Probably one of the coolest scrambles I've ever done.