Route type: Circular
Difficulty level: Strenuous (includes handholds)
Distance: 8.3 km
Waze to start/end point: Birkat Tzfira campground
Notes:
- Do not hike here if there are any flood warnings in the area!
- Do not hike in extreme heat!
- Start with the sunrise to beat the heat. There is no shade.
We had hiked the Lower Nahal Tze’elim Loop about a month ago. You can read that post here.
The winter is desert hiking season and I keep feeing drawn to it over and over. There is something so soothing about the desert colors and lack of visual chaos.
Last week we had 2-3 days of torrential downpours pretty much country-wide and there was serious flooding even in major cities.
I have never hiked so soon after any of the desert riverbeds flooded. To walk through that scenery and hear the trickle of water as it cascaded down from the higher pools to the lower pools was incredible.
In the south, there is high risk of having your car stolen however this is the 2nd time recently that I have left my car parked at Birket Tzfira campground. It felt safe because there were a lot of other cars and campers there, even early in the morning.
The frigid morning started out kinda boring on a wide, stony road. The pointy mountain in the 2nd picture below is Har Tzfira.
Oh look! Spotting animal life always gives me a thrill.
While my friend made an – ahem! – important stop, I was gazing into a standing pool of water and noticed a large snail upside down in the water. How on earth did he get there???
I fished him out and set him on a rock in the sun to dry off. Pretty soon I saw his feelers cautiously appearing. Wasn’t he fortunate I came along?? I named him Kevin.
The hike was made more challenging by having to navigate around the pools of water (which, most of the time, wasn’t difficult) and significant amounts of mud.
There were also huge quantities of all manner of garbage which had washed down from elsewhere in the flood – plastic bottles, fish line, bits of styrofoam, car parts, broken baby car seats….it was horrific.
The water in this riverbed just never seemed to end! There were a few points where we had to either climb up or down to get around impassable pools. It just kept getting more and more interesting and we kept saying “Oh wow! I didn’t expect THAT!”
Case in point. As we hopped along from stone to stone in order to stay out of the mud fields, we were startled to come across this cutie. He didn’t seem too perturbed by us.
