Camping In The Negev

This past weekend we went camping with some friends in the Negev.  We stayed at the Khan Be’erot campsite, which is at the bottom of the Mitzpe Ramon crater, about halfway between Be’er Sheva and Eilat, pretty much right in the middle of the Negev desert.  The weather is perfect there this time of year, it was in the low 70s during the day, and low 60s/high 50s at night.  Its the same communal campsite as the one we stayed at in the Carmel near Haifa – a common parking lot, and a bunch of random areas to put your tent; you just grab whatever spot you can find.  There are a lot of picnic tables, nice public bathrooms with showers, the same public refrigerator room so you don’t have to bother with a huge cooler.  And especially important for this particular campsite in the desert, several large shade structures where you can sit, eat etc, or even drag your entire tent under if you want.  I don’t know how many of you are star wars fans, but if you walk a bit into the desert away from the campsite and then turn around and look back at it, it totally looks like some old town on the planet Tatooine where Luke Skywalker (or Anakin, depending on which star wars generation you’re originally from, i suppose 😀) might have grown up…

The desert in the Negev is not like the desert in Arizona.  The Sonoran desert in AZ actually has a lot of vegetation, small tree-like shrubs such as palo verde, mesquite, and ironwood, and of course cactuses – golden barrel, organ pipe and the famous saguaro cactus.  The Negev desert – not so much.  It’s totally barren.  

There are however, rare places where either the groundwater surfaces a bit or the brief rainwater from the winter rains collects, where some vegetation can be seen.  We did an approx 4.5mi roundtrip hike from the campsite to one of those “oases.”  The hike there was just a total barren moon-scape; actually maybe more like mars from the movie The Martian, or from those pics you see from the Mars rover. Beautiful rock escarpments and other formations could be seen along the path.  When you think about wandering in that desert for 40 years, wow. The wadi, or most dry riverbed, did have a lot of vegetation, though because it is early in the winter season, there were only a few places with standing water.  

The other amazing thing about this campsite was the view of the stars at night.  Holy Cow!  Apparently Mitzpe Ramon is known to be one of the best places for stargazing because it is so remote and the air is dry.  You could see the entire milky way, many constellations and on top of that, there was a meteor shower that weekend. One of the kids counted 19 meteors for the two nights.  i brought my telescope which we had brought with us from the US and we saw jupiter and it’s moons, saturn, eta cas (a binary star in the constellation Cassiopeia), the pleiades cluster, and the Orion nebula all in one night.  

On the way back from the campgrounds we stopped at the Ramon Crater visitors center which is right on the edge of the crater with amazing views.  Its sort of like Israel’s own mini-Grand Canyon.  We also stopped at an alpaca farm nearby.  All in all it was a very good outing.