The far south - high desert, low desert, and every cliff in between

There are a couple things about the Negev desert which aren't well known, the most important being that it's big. Large. Really quite sizable. A three-hour ride on bus 392 from CBS Be'er Sheva including a break at the Mitzpe Ramon gas station if you want specifics.

It also has amazing geological diversity and forty-four species of herbs, but I know a lot more about the buses so let's stick to that.

Bus No. 392 CBS Be'er Sheva - CBS Eilat Alighting left me and two cyclists at a highway junction in the Ovda valley in the southern Negev after a three-hour ride including a break at the Mitzpe Ramon gas station. I checked the map, talked to the bikers, and made quite sure that I was at the wrong bus stop. I settled for walking an extra 5 km of Shvil Yisrael next to the road, passing occasional Swiss tourists.

Winter had finally soaked into the Negev, and the desert was blooming more colorfully than seventy years of pipelines and bulldozers could manage, not with cleared and plowed fields as ben Gurion dreamed but with the purple and yellow petals of the wildflowers of the wadi.

And the anti-Muslim graffiti on the walls of the bridge over the wadi. The perfect background.

I headed down the wadi, which was very wide and open except for the wildflowers and bushes growing from the sand. The sky was not-quite-flat gray and the land was not-quite-flat brown. There were hills but no landmarks, and it was a very long way to the road and the climb up into the Kasui sand dunes, which I remembered from years before. They aren't freestanding but pour down from the rocky hills in waves of soft tan. I ate lunch there, but the cold east wind blew sand into my pita and cucumbers and bourekas, and behold all was crunchy.

The trail kept near the road after that, but because this is Israel I still passed a few ancient sites, endless desert hills, and an airport, before climbing up into the mountains of broken brown stone, which lay very still under the evening wind and the high clouds stretching all the way to the snowy mountains of Jordan. I followed a high ridge between two deep wadis until sunset.

In the cloudy blue of the next morning I climbed back into the mountains, down to the road, past the site where I should have camped, and into the mountains on the other side of the road. The southern Negev is the rare place in Israel where you can see forever and yet still feel in the middle of nowhere. The mountains roll on, hill after rocky hill and wadi after deep flowering wadi all the way to the Egyptian border, maybe further, but there are no landmarks to the west, and though you stand on the easternmost precipice and look over the Arava towards the high purple mountains of Jordan, they tower in their long line all the way from the Kinneret to Eilat and down the Red Sea coast unchanging. I kept walking, past a line of hikers who told me that I probably couldn't make it to the lake at Timna Park and suggested the visitors' center, which wasn't on the map.

The trail turned away from the edge and into the heart of the mountains, climbing into and out of the wide wadis which cut through them. There were no trees of any size and the hills were rolling and totally open here at the top of the world (only about 700 meters, but who can tell in the middle of the desert). Thunder echoed from the north, and occasionally some light rain fell onto the gravel and vanished. I have a certain amount of fatalism and a light poncho which both serve me well in the backcountry. I knew that I was maybe 10 km from the nearest road and much further from any shelter that could stand up to a real storm, so there wasn't anything to do right now other than put on the poncho. So I did, and then the rain pattered away, because this is the far south where even the winter storms don't come.

After even more bleak sandy hills and open wadis thick with flowers and thorns, the trail curved back to the edge of the mountains, but in Israel, below mountains there are more mountains. Cliffs above gave way to canyons slicing through the lower plateau before falling away for hundreds of feet towards the brown mountains in the valley. Perched on the cliff-edges of this sandy-rocky, precipitous, uninhabited landscape were...school groups. I passed them and tried to ignore the shouts of "Ahlan" ("hello", borrowed from Arabic; Shalom is more formal) as they tried to evoke echoes from the cliffs.

a section of the upper cliff

Which I had to get down from, somehow. There was a trail; it twisted around the eastern edge and slid through dust and scree before teetering at the top of a narrow ridge, not a knife-edge, but thin enough that looking down was exciting. There were beautiful views of sandy canyons and mountains with no names, but it would have been nice to see some sign of a campsite, because it was late in the afternoon now, and as the clouds broke up the light was pale gold. Now there were shallow, steep, sandy canyons on every side, and I followed the edges to a nice campsite which was completely taken up by the gear for the same school groups I'd passed before (though the workers setting everything up for them urged me to just stop there for the night) and then into the Sasgon valley, the valley of colors. Colors at this time of day meant soft brown sand.

I crossed a wide valley, pale in the dusk, before I got to the visitors' center. The gate was locked, with a cell number for would-be campers to call. I called, forgot to mention that I didn't have a car and couldn't "come back tomorrow", and explained that I was doing a section of the Israel Trail - 
"So you're doing the Israel Trail, you don't have a car?"
"Yes."
"OK, you can come in..."
A paragraph or two of direction followed.
"Around the side?"
"Yes."

In the morning I climbed Mt. Timna. Now I can read a topographical map as well as any generalization alive, but I still didn't realize that it would be quite so steep. A shady canyon became a stony wadi which climbed high up to wider, lifeless high passes. It was very alpine considering I was at 400 meters. I scrambled past a giant rock mushroom, grasped my way up a few iron bars, and peered at the top of the cliff. A large flock of something was standing on the flat dolomite. I took another step up and they flew away. 

The climb down was harder; there wasn't a trail so much as a slope of scree, boulders, and the occasional blaze. It was midmorning, clear and hot. In the desert every sunny day is summer. Endless sand and barren hills lay across the valley all the way to...the pond. The parks authority has a habit of installing things like that. The environmental logic of putting a large pond in the middle of the desert is lost on me, but apparently they know better. The pond is at the visitors' center and campground, but still...

Past Timna the Israel Trail heads into more hills, stony and colorful, past what seems to be a mine (I don't know whether this was within the park boundaries, though virtually the only thing you can't do in a national park is camp there) and then threaded past the hills at the western boundary of the 'Arava, the long, open valley which runs north-south from the Dead Sea to Eilat and folds along the Jordanian border like the willow leaf it's named for. In other words, it was an easy place to find food.

Sort of. It was a 3-km walk each way to the nearest (surprisingly fortified) village, which had lots of new construction and, more surprisingly, a signpost about the town's history which noted the Bedouin tribe expelled from the area (No, it didn't say that they were expelled. Maybe they all decided to buy apartments in Ra'anana. Maybe). Today the area around the town is, like the rest of the southern Negev, uninhabited.

In the afternoon I followed a wide, sandy wadi slowly up into the mountains, which rose higher and higher as I walked south and redder and redder as the sun set, until at sunset I walked into a canyon which swirled through the sand and the rocks - until it was just rocks, and then bigger rocks, tent-sized, car-sized, house-sized. The trail, of course, went straight through them, and then up some dry waterfalls. It was dusk now. The wadi was supposed to climb up to a mountain pass before climbing down the cliffs to the 'Arava, but it just kept climbing up. As the light faded the shadows came back, short black shadows against a little silver light; the moon was high, but not full. 

The path was above the wadi now, very narrow, trail blaze colorless in the gray moonlight, cool in the evening wind. A little further, a little further...and I walked up to the pass, black mountains above and the lights of Eilat and Aqaba below. I saw the Red Sea, an empty black shape beyond the cities. Of course, I couldn't really see the way down.

It was another narrow path down the sides of a canyon, silver under the half-moon, slippery with dust and scree and darkness. In the far distance there were black shapes which looked like chasms in the night but there was no telling. I had hoped to get to the campground at the entrance of the Black Canyon four kilometers away and a few hundred meters down, but the slopes were steep and cold with only the half moon to light the way, and after a hillside crossroads far too dark to see which blaze was which, I pitched my tent in the sand, tried to stop the wild night wind from tossing it all the way to Eilat, and slept. 

In the warm morning I followed the trail through a canyon which opened onto the western 'Arava before leading to the Shakhoret (roughly "black") canyon, a short sandy path through steep brown-black mountains ending at the base of a limestone mountain. In the Eilat mountains there is a dramatic line between basalt and limestone which I kept crossing through the day. I climbed the mountain, which looked a few hundred meters shorter than it really was, climbed down, followed the trail through pale valleys with no trees on a still, sunny day...the hottest summer I ever spent was a winter in the Negev, to grossly distort Mark Twain. I walked on the ridges for the slight breeze, and each kilometer was eternal in the silent desert.

Which was a problem, because I had seven hours and two liters left. The Israel National Trail ends on the coast south of Eilat, twenty kilometers from my valley; I decided to take a shortcut to Eilat via Mt. Shlomo, which I'd seen years before and longed to climb.

Shortcuts are of course never shortcuts. Mt. Shlomo is 700m high and at least 350m above the valley I was in, and extraordinarily steep. Climbing it took an hour and a half or so and I ended up just lying down on the sharp-basalt summit watching the ibex below. It's not often that you get to look down on an ibex.

The way down was, of course, a steep canyon, with much more climbing than walking. The last few kilometers were on wide dirt roads, downhill through the mountains to the city. Eilat is one of those cities which simply ends; I walked out of the desert, crossed one road, and there were the apartment blocks. The tourist areas are by the beach; most of the city is perfectly normal. But I had walked all this way to get to the Red Sea, and I had no time before my bus left but I wanted at least to see the waves. And to drink something, because I'd ran out of water half an hour before I got to Eilat. So I ran down to the nearest beach, ran back to the bus station through the back streets, and watched the sunset from an air-conditioned bus headed north. That was it.