Day 2: Har Shlomo to Shkhoret Night Camp

Day 2: Har Shlomo to Shkhoret Night Camp

Day 2, March 1: Much easier. Lost and found spork. WINDY at camp; janky tarp solution. Desert sand way different than beach sand. Camp: Wadi...

The desert is really, really windy all night long. I rigged my tarp as a kind of shield facing into the wind to keep it off me; not all of me was covered but there was no rain, so wind shelter was all that mattered. I had to struggle and experiment with a lot of different tarp setups before I found one that really worked well. The sand there also gets everywhere and into everything. You become coated in a layer of dust, but actually it's not bad - it's much better than humidity, and I didn't feel dirty like I had when hiking in the north and sweating all day.

Idan informed me that it was in fact Shkhoret Night Camp where we slept this time - I'd forgotten.

The usual Negev topography of sharp ups and downs sometimes gave way to broad valleys like

this one. My 50mm lens lacked a wide enough angle to capture it, unfortunately.

A few of the 150-strong group make their way across desert singletrack. This is terrain I would

love to bring a mountain bike back to someday. Which reminds me, I've thought how great it would

be to route a mountain bike version of the Israel Trail. (There has since been an Israel Bike Trail

in development, though I think it takes a different route and misses this stretch).

The layers of mountain slowly erode, yellow giving way to red and then to black as seen above

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