Intro and Nahal Nesher

View to the east on the Nahal Nesher loop, about 3/4 of the way through

This is my first post and I'm as familiar with the format as anyone is after five minutes, so forgive whatever it is that I'm messing up right now. To start out with, I'm an American living in Haifa, Israel, for the year; I'm a student, insofar as I've graduated high school and haven't started college yet; I call myself a photographer; and if you're reading this, you probably know all that anyway. For now, I hike. My family's apartment is just north of the Carmel forest, which is the largest park in Israel, and I explore the trails. My writing here, with luck, is somewhere between nature writing and trail guide.

The Nahal Nesher loop starts just below the University buildings on the Isfiya road. The right fork of a paved road leads to a gravel path leads to a windswept pine on an east-facing cliff. I knew this because I'd watched the sunrise there the day before. At home I set an alarm, woke up at dawn, and walked up the humid hill towards the windswept pine. On my way in I passed a small group camping illegally and sleeping peacefully. At the pine, I watched the sky and waited. I found a place just above the oak forest to set up a tripod. The sun rose after a quick small brightening in the clouds, already more white than yellow or red. Within a minute or two warm light shone on the pine needles and rocks. I found the trail entrance further on the paved road, just below a picnic area. A large trilingual sign told me that at least one person in my group had better have a 1:50,000 trail map. Oops. The blue-blazed trail headed more-or-less-
gently downhill, with a few left turns and pine branches scattered on the rock path, through what could be described as open forest, but only on average. Mostly either scrubland or claustrophobic. After maybe a kilometer (though I have no real idea) the forest cleared and I found myself walking on the edge of a cliff.

Not a particularly scary cliff, though. If I fell off, I would land on some very unfriendly bushes and rocks, but they were only about five feet down. Sunburn was a bigger risk. It was a very open cliff, though, and I had a wonderful view of the region's numerous and large skyscrapers. And construction sites. But once you're a thousand or so feet above them they look...OK. They'll never look charming. They look marginally less blightlike. There was also a view of the countryside and, to the east, a gorge between mountain ridges, hundreds of feet deep with hazy limestone shelves. It might have been carved two million years ago by a river, two thousand years ago by local stone cutters, or twenty years ago by ditto. 

The path tended roughly west across the cliff, keeping level but curving among the hills for a kilometer or two. The view was hazy but on the rocks next to me the light never paled. Finally the trail abruptly turned left and curved up almost vertically through tall shady pines and gnarled katlav trees, red-barked and peeling. After a few hundred scrambling meters I climbed back up to the windswept pine. I had never seen it in full daylight and barely recognized it.