This morning I took another hike in the hills. In order to save a little time, I started by driving the car to a spot a short distance up highway 12. The drive took about 6 minutes, but it would have taken 15-20 minutes to walk there.
From that point, there is a bicycle trail through the hills over to Nakhal Shakhamon. In fact, there are LOTS of bicycle trails like this in the hills near here. They might be just a bit scary for me to ride my bike on (I haven't actually tried yet), but they are GREAT for hiking!
When I reached Nakhal Shakhamon, I followed the gravel road for a short distance and then turned left on a trail in a narrower canyon. The trail is well marked, but it shortly begins to go up a very steep part of the canyon towards a saddle. Even from way down, one can see that there are two power-line towers up in the saddle. In fact, there is even a gravel road up the other side, but I didn't know that until I got up there, of course. Nevertheless, the route around the mountain to the road would have been MUCH longer, and the steep trail was very beautiful.
From the saddle, it's only a short hike up the ridge to the peek of the mountain.
But, let's back up a bit. Here's a view of the mountain as seen from our laundry-room window. Of course, I cropped the original severely to show you just the mountain!
Here's another very cropped picture showing you the view of the mountain from where I parked the car.
But the really spectacular views, of course, are from the top of the mountain itself. I took all three of the following pictures from the summit. These are all cropped from their originals. The first one shows the view looking north-northeast. On the right side in the foreground, you can see the ridge of the mountain, and to its left is the valley on the west side (you can see the power-line gravel road at the bottom of it). In the distance, you can see far up the Arava, and, in the upper right you can see some of the mountains in Jordan.
Here's the view looking approximate east-southeast. You can see most of Aqaba, the end of the eastern branch of the Red Sea (the Gulf of Aqaba or the Gulf of Eilat), and most of Eilat (except our neighborhood).
This last view is slightly less cropped than the one above and looks approximately southeast. This one shows most of Eilat, except for the northern parts and the hotel district. In this view, the mountains that are barely visible on the other side of the Gulf at the extreme right of the picture are probably in Saudi Arabia. The other mountains, of course, are in Jordan. Although not shown in any of these pictures, I could also see mountains to the south that are in Egypt.
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