Hiking the Gravel Wadi

I went hiking this weekend with my friend (and next door neighbour) Hadas and Joelle, a post-doc in her lab from France. We hiked through two wadis--the gravel wadi (sounds beautiful, no?) and the name of the second doesn't really translate.

Here's Joelle and Hadas. And those are toques--It was pretty cold in the morning!

Once again, we chose our location based on what might be flowering. We thought we might hit the end of the tulip season here, and we did. This is one of the only plants I know the hebrew name for--it translates as "colourful"

Here's where we spent the night. You can see our tent, really small in the bottom right corner.

Our tent was kind of on the peak of the hill, so we had great views both to the east and the west. So at night we could sit and watch the sunset.....

And then woke up frightfully early to watch the sunrise from the other side.

And just so you know, that it is much more beautiful there than the name implies, here is a picture of the gravel wadi in the daytime.
It was a fantastic hike. I had been told that I needed to spend a night out in the desert--it was a bit (or a lot) too cold to spend the night under the stars (although I did manage to do that later as well) but still I'm really glad that we chose to make this a two day hike. The hike ends with a climb out of the Zin (the canyon behind the midreshet--there's a picture in one of the first few posts), a bit of a long slog to be at the end of the hike, but we arrived home exhausted and happy.