Haifa- Har Meron

Today Efrat met Hadas and I, and we went hiking in the Har Meron area, about 1 hour from North East of Haifa.

The area is mountainous, fairly rocky, and with more vegetation than I had seen in a long time.

Especially in comparison with the south, quite a bit was still in bloom here. The plants in the north are usually a few weeks behind the plants in the south, so if you wanted to you could just keep moving north and follow the blooming of the flowers.
There were lots of interesting flowers, including these orchids.

But what everyone had gone to see were the adomiotes--they're flowers that only bloom every few years (not all together, so there are blooms every year) and only in this one region in Israel. We hadn't really realized that they would be in bloom now--if we had we might have known what to expect.

I had said in an earlier post, that when something new is in bloom it seems like huge numbers of Israelis make the trip to see it. This was no exception, but there were more people here than I had seen at any one of the other flowerings. There were busloads of people, many of whom even had guides with megaphones to show them where the flowers were. We were lucky that they were only on a short portion of our hike--the portion which had the highest densities of these flowers.

The first one we saw even had a sign posted beside it explaining what the flower was. We ran into some other people at this sign, who had told us that there were 3 (!) blooming ahead on the trail. All this travel for 3 flowers?

We found those 3, plus a few others.

Admittedly, they are a beautiful flower.

And I think even more special just before they open.
But what I think was more interesting to me that day, was all the people coming to see the flowers, rather than the flowers themselves.