2023-12-25 31 35

Location

Forest south of Ramat Raziel on the side of a hill a few hundred meters from any real path.

Participants

Yosef

Plans

Park in Ramat Raziel north of the hashpoint. Walk down into the nature reserve and back towards Pitulim (Curvy) Mountain. The first goal is to get to the lower trail on the Eastern side of the mountain and then work my way up to the hashpoint. I'll do it by either going over the mountain and back down to the other side or just find a reasonable animal trail north of the peak that branches eastward into the valley. From the eastern trail I'm going to have to bushwack back up.

Expedition

I got to Ramat Raziel and decided to park closer from within the nature reserve. That saved me a kilometer of walking.

I walked on the trail as planned and did find a reasonable animal trail to walk down to the Eastern human trail.

Bushwhacking was kind of fun. The Judean Hills have some ancient terraces and I either had to snake around those or climb them. I think the highest might have made it to three meters. I was really lucky. There were very few thorns or mosquitoes and the gnats were not too bothersome.

I finally got within twenty meters of the hashpoint. I noticed that as I got closer, I could be less picky about the animal trails that I chose for bushwhacking. By the end it was just stepping on shrubs and around trees. The hashpoint was between two trees with tons of greenery on the ground to step on. I think there was wild rosemary there so it smelled excellent.

Getting back was kind of hard. I decided to go up to the West and find a relatively empty terrace to walk north along, hoping to either get back to my original foot or animal trails. I made it to the central foot trail and walked back to the car.

The Jerusalem Forest in winter is excellent. There aren't too many mosquitoes, the air is perfect, and everything is green.