Hike to the upper pools at Ein Avdat - 9 February 2013

Last Shabbat (9 February 2013), we decided to visit Ein Avdat again. Last time we were there, I only hiked to the lower pool, below the waterfall. You can see my post about that at this link.

This time, I headed for the upper pools, above the waterfall. In order to get there, you must turn right before the pools at the foot of the waterfall and go up these steps that are hewn into the side of the canyon. Note the metal handholds in the wall along the lower steps!

When you get to the top of the steps, there is a path about 30 cm (1 foot) wide and about 10 cm (4 inches) deep that is cut into a ledge that is around 2 m (6-7 feet) wide (my estimates). This goes all along the right side (as you are going up the canyon) of the lower pools. Here's a view of the waterfall from that ledge:

Here are a couple of views looking down the canyon and back toward the ledge, where you can see people walking along. In these views, you can also see the lower pools and people down near them. These are both taken from very near where the water goes down a short slope before the actual top of the waterfall (which, of course, you can NOT see in these photos!):

Here's another view looking more directly down the canyon, again from just above the waterfall:

Above the waterfall and just a little further upstream, there are more pools. The canyon curves toward the left (as you are going up it). There's a place between pools where the trail crosses the stream. Here's a view from that general area looking down the canyon (back toward the waterfall):

In this view, we are looking UP the canyon from that same general area. There's a small grove of poplar trees growing on the slope above the stream (but FAR below the top of the cliffs, of course!). You can see a view of them on the right side of this photo:

The area upstream of here is closed to the public so that the wild animals can feel safe there. There is a trail up the right cliff from here, but it is one-way only (UP!), so you can only take it if somebody can drive to the upper entrance of Ein Avdat and pick you up there.

My last picture is a close-up of some pretty colors in the small side branch where the water was barely flowing at all. I'm sure these colors are due to various minerals in the water:

I took all these photos with the built-in camera and standard camera app on my iPhone 4S. Of course, I did crop them and scaled the size so that the files wouldn't be to big for uploading and viewing, but I didn't do any other kind of editing at all on them.

Flowers along Highway 12

I was always amazed and impressed by the profusion of wild flowers every Spring when we were in the North. Of course, here in the desert of the South, there are simply nowhere near as many plants of any kind since we get so little rain. However, there still ARE some very lovely wildflowers, particularly along highway 12.

There's a place on highway 12 a little south of the Uvda airport where, for no apparent reason, there are wider shoulders on the road and places not quite opposite each other on both sides where there are short curbs with a bit of sidewalk, just like where there are bus stops, except there are NO bus stops here and no obvious reason why there every WOULD be! David and I refer to this as "the wide place in the road".

Since this is along the route that we call "the short loop" (up highway 90 to highway 40, then over and down highway 12 back to Eilat), we drive by this place quite often. Last week, I stopped at the wide place in the road and snapped these pictures.

This plant you see in the first couple of photos is the most obvious when you're whizzing along the highway. The flowers are a kind of coral pink and very noticeable. There are also LOTS of these nearly everywhere in the Uvda area in the drainage ditches on both sides of the road. In English, these would probably be called dock, or dock weed:

Here's a more close-up view of a different bunch of them:

Upon closer inspection, one discovers that there are actually several kinds of flowers. Here we see some small purplish white ones:

These are nearly pure white and are VERY small:

I've never seen flowers quite like these before. They are tiny yellow balls, about a centimeter in diameter:

These are also yellow and quite small, but they look something like cornflowers to me:

I took all these photos with the standard camera app on my iPhone 4S. Of course, I did crop them, and I also scaled their size so that the files wouldn't be inordinately large for uploading and viewing. Other than that, they are unedited.