Route type: Circular
Difficulty level: Easy
Waze to start point: 31.951303, 34.955521
Notes:
- Beat the heat and crowds by getting as early a start as possible!
- Mostly shaded
- Good for dogs, kids who can walk.
- Easy to lengthen or shorten this hike by taking any number of alternative paths.
- Not well-marked as a hiking trail – this is a bike trail and is marked as such.
I had gotten most of my Shavuot cooking done on Thursday and even though I still had some to do on Friday, I was itching for a hike and figured if it was short, easy and near home, I could squeeze one in.
I grabbed a friend and we left at 5:30 am to start hiking by 6:00 am.
The entire Ben Shemen Forest is hugely popular for mountain bikers and the entry road to the forest is lined with all manner of stands – bike equipment supply and repair stands, food stands, fresh juice stands. The parking lot is immediately on your left as you turn onto this road from Route 443.
This 10K loop is a bike trail, not a hiking trail per se, so be prepared to leap out of the way of bikers who may come flying around a bend at any moment. The earlier you go, the fewer bikers there will be. But it is still good to be aware and prepared to get out of their way should you encounter any.
This trail is not marked as a hiking trail and would be almost impossible to navigate without using the map link given at the beginning of this post. We did see some very old, faint blue and white trail markings but we only saw a handful of these so they clearly could not be relied upon.
The more prevalent trail markings were either blue or red bike trail markings but this forest is so criss-crossed with bike trails that I would not rely on these bike signs to get you around this 10K loop reliably.
It was so wonderfully cool and refreshing when we began at 6:00 am with the sun just beginning to peep through the trees.
Very easy terrain.
Along the way there are a number of large clearings with picnic tables.
One was shockingly dirty….
Further along it looked like someone at least made an effort.
The weather has been consistently quite hot lately so not many flowers are left but we did see an abundance of this magnificent flower, the common caper.
Common caper blooms for almost six months, from April until September. The flowers are single, large, non-actimorphic, very fragrant. The flower has a diameter of 6 cm. The 4 petals are arranged in 2 pairs, like a butterfly’s wings. There are numerous stamens (70-120). Their filaments are white at the base and gradually turn a bright pink at their tip. The stamens remind me of a cat’s whiskers.
Flower buds, young fruits, young branches and leaves of different species of caper are pickled and are regarded as excellent seasoning. Four out of a total of 350 species of caper grow in Israel.
We had one long rest stop en route of about 30 minutes and finished up the hike at 10:00. I would not have liked to have ended any later. Already by 8:45 we were starting to feel the heat ratcheting up.
All in all, a nice, close-to-home, easy hike. These are always nice to have in my repertoire to pull out when I need one.