2025-02-06 31 35

Location

An orchard off of route 3, next door to the orchard I visited a month ago

Participants

Yerushalmi (talk) Yosef (talk) 11:17, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

Plans

Bus routes to the area look awful. I'll take the car; it's a 20-minute drive.

Expedition

Pretty much as planned. It had been raining all week, and the rain was on and off today, but when I found some spare time in midday I took route 1 out of Jerusalem, then turned onto route 3.

I used OsmAnd for navigation; it said there was a turnoff into the road surrounding the orchard. But I drove right past it without seeing one.

Okay, make a U-turn. Again I drove right past it; no turnoff exists.

I pulled into the first turnoff I could find, a gravel area adjacent to the next-door orchards where the point was last time and the same place I had parked then. Time to investigate the map: the road that OsmAnd thinks exists might not exist, but in the northern portion of this clearing there's supposedly a path that heads east, towards the orchard. I got out of the car and headed north.

The path did, indeed, exist, though it dipped down into a creekbed and was thus partially hidden. The creek was active thanks to the rain (it almost certainly doesn't exist in the summer) but it was less than ankle-deep and easy to cross.

On the other side of the creekbed, after a short incline, was the orchard. I took the path around it to the north and then east, as it got increasingly muddy. It's the month of Shvat, so these were recognizably almond trees in bloom.

Easy enough to use satellite mode in GeohashDroid to walk down the rows of almond trees until I found the right one, then walk up that row until I found the tree at the center of the point. I got close enough for the proof-and-panorama, then dug an X in the ground with my foot.

It's very muddy. Nobody will see the X. I'll stick a rock in the center of it, too.

Walk back to the car, drive back home. The rain started again on the way.