Nakhal Shlomo

Early yesterday morning (8 May 2012), I decided to take a hike to an area west of here beyond where I had walked before. In that area, there is a cluster of huge fuel or oil storage tanks, which, of course, is surrounded by a strong security fence. I walked on the exterior perimeter road until I got to the other side. After going a short distance further, I saw this beautiful view:

The picture above is looking almost straight west. As I mentioned it was very early in the morning (between 6:30 and 7:00), so the sun was still low. You can see the moon, which was full only a day or two earlier, above the mountain on the other side shortly before moonset (is that a real word?).

The next picture is the view in approximately the south-southwest direction from the same spot. In this view, you can just barely see the Red Sea in the background at the left.

The name of this canyon is actually Nakhal Shlomo (which I learned from the signs). By checking Google Maps satellite view, I could see that the canyon crosses highway 12 some distance up from here, and I knew that spot quite well. It was also apparent from the satellite view and from what I saw yesterday morning, that there was a reasonably good gravel road through this canyon. I figured we could probably make it in our car, so today we decided to give it a try between about 4:30 and 6:00 this evening.

I annotated the satellite view below to show you my hiking route and the route we drove through the canyon. At the extreme right is the location of our apartment, and the route of my walk is marked in hot pink. The route we drove through the canyon is the yellow line that goes from highway 12 in the upper left corner to highway 90, right by the Red Sea, in the lower right corner.

 

Here's a pretty picture I took in the canyon of a rather large acacia tree.

For the next picture I cropped the above picture even more so that you can easily see the REAL reason for the pictures: two ibexes grazing under the tree!