Gev Holit to Gevanim

This morning we made our way out of the poop mine field that was the night camp we stayed at. The first climb of the day was up a dry waterfall and it was pretty much straight up over a bunch of boulders and more rocks. Once we were at the top I saw a herd of ibex grazing on the next lump over. They are so cute.

After a couple kilometers of walking in a sandy dry stream bed we started our second ascent of the day. At the top we caught up with all the other hikers who had left the night camp earlier this morning. We stayed at the top for a little while talking to our other American friend and looking (successfully) for ammonite fossils.

We hiked back down into the valley and shortly found ourselves at our third climb of the day. The trail did a weird turn where it could have just kept going straight to the top of the climb instead of dipping back down and then going to the top. I stayed on the trail while P and A took what they thought the trail should do and found a pretty questionable stretch that the actual trail avoids. At the top we took a break in the shade and watched fighter jets do maneuvers above us.

We walked down into our first crater of the trail. The Ramon crater is the largest erosion created crater on the planet! It wasn't as deep as I thought it would be when the guide book described a crater... it looked like any other valley (wadi) we have walked through thus far (most likely because it is so big that we can't see the all of the walls from the crater floor).

Around 10 we reached the edge of a canyon we had to walk through to get into the crater, so we stopped and completed a crossword puzzle before continuing on. There were huge groups of school aged kids walking through this area so we had to navigate through them to get to and up our fourth and final ascent of the day. Jeez. Was that rough. Reminder: I don't have poles. It was getting really hot and going up the side of a canyon pretty much sounds as bad as it was. Plus there were little kids springing down the same slope we were on so that was a nice bonus challenge. When I finally got to the top it wasn't so bad. After doing that without poles I feel like I can do pretty much anything this trail places in my path.

We were able to see our night camp at this point and we could even make up a little line of port a potties lining camp. This got us pretty excited considering yesterday's bathroom situation. When we got closer to our final descent we decided to hang out higher up for a bit before setting up camp. After 2 crossword puzzles it got really hot so we opted to head down to the night camp and set up our tents for shade. At the same time we saw a truck pull out of the camp with all the potties loaded on the back... welp that was too good to be true. Oh well.

We got to camp and set up by 2 and waited another 3 hours for the other hikers we saw this morning to get there.  

I really wish I had my Kindle... After the first couple of days that were apparently hotter than normal according to some other hikers we have found a system that works for us but it also means we have a bunch of extra time at the end of the day. This is very different than hiking the PCT. 

Oh. It rained tonight! Like 5 drops... but it was still precipitation!