Notes from Yeruham: Springtime in the Negev

Springtime has arrived in the Negev! The desert around Yeruham, for the most part, is very arid. Here is a photo from a few weeks ago that I took during a short trip twenty miles East of Yeruham. As you can see, the landscape is quite barren.

This is a photo of one of several famous craters in the area.

The crater basin is completely dry, but you can see the channels carved out by rainwater, which flows out through the opening at the other end of the crater.

A week later, the children went with Rachel on a trip to see what it looks like in the desert when it rains. As you can see, there is lots of water!

As this trip was part of our weekly Tuesday afternoon family outing club, the afternoon ended with a snack prepared over a fire. Since it was raining, the outing club guide taught the children how to make a fire using cotton wool and vaseline which burned despite the rain and allowed them to roast marshmallows. (Yes, believe it or not, we allowed the children to eat marshmallows!)

The roasting was as much fun as the eating.

The following week, we experienced another encounter with water in the desert a few kilometers from Yeruham.

In the midst of the desert, a hole was dug to collect rain water. As you can see, where the water collects, trees grow, creating an oasis.

Some of the trees are palm trees.

We hiked beyond the oasis further into the desert.

We arrived at a place where the water had carved a smooth channel and pools in the solid rock of the desert floor. There was rainwater in the channel.

We sat along the channel and did watercolor paintings of the desert.

The day's snack cooked over an open fire was hot chocolate!

Today, we traveled an hour from Yeruham to a place in the desert called the Friendship Forest. The forest receives more rain than the Yeruham area. In the summer, it is brown and dusty like Yeruham. But after the winter rains, grass grows and flowers bloom. The red flower in this field is the Calanit, which blooms during a two-week period marking the start of spring. After two months in Yeruham, the color was overwhelming.

Here is the Calanit up close.

Here you can see a large cluster of cacti in the middle of this photo.

Here is heather blooming.

All over the ground, we found pottery shards. The brown one on the right is from the Byzantine period and the grey one on the left is from the Ottoman period. The brown one is over 1500 years old and the grey one is 800 years old!