March 2014: The Golan Trail

Hike-and-Bikepacking the Golan Trail

The Golan Trail is a 120-kilometer route across the length of this little volcanic plateau. It begins in the foothills of Mt. Hermon, the only regularly-snowcapped mountain to be found in Israeli-held areas, but the southernmost of a range of much higher mountains that distinguish Lebanon's landscape. It continues south across the flat but rugged plains of the central Golan, gradually declining, until the steep wadis draining down to the Sea of Galilee take over and the plateau gives way to the Yarmouk river valley in the south.

I'd tried hiking the trail in 2011 just after finishing the Israel Trail, but a change of footwear to Chacos without an adjustment period left my feet in ruins, and my psychological appetite for hiking was exhausted at about the same time, so I never completed it. As it would turn out, I still haven't - my attempt to cycle the whole thing was thwarted by the majority of the trail surface turning out to be not 4x4 track, as indicated by the previously reliable SPNI topo map, but extremely jagged-rock-filled singletrack, with extensive damage from cow hoofs to boot. Plenty of hike-a-bike sessions led me to detour to roads when I figured it was necessary - anything to keep my progress above 2 miles an hour.

A four-hour ride from Jerusalem got me to Majdal Shams later than I'd have liked, so I didn't have a lot of daylight to work with on the first day. Luckily, the views started right away...

Mt. Hermon, tri-country border and local snow magnet, looming above Majdal Shams - northernmost

Israeli-controlled town, whose Druze population used to stand by the border fence with megaphones

to shout conversations with their friends and family on the Syrian side

One of the few good rain sessions of the year left a lot of the Golan trail in conditions like this

The terribly dry winter of '13-'14 happened to grant one of its few days-long rain sessions during the dates I'd originally planned for this trip, so I had to postpone right up against a trip to Turkey. I'd normally have avoided riding the trail just after such a rain (as I'd been warned to do by everyone I told about the trip) but by the time I got back it would be early-mid April and the weather might already be unbearably hot. So I was greeted with plenty of the sort of slop pictured above - but most of the terrain-related difficulties were not actually thanks to mud!

The other iffy thing about the trip: my physical conditioning. While the Golan Trail is not remarkable for its difficulty, I had scarcely touched my bike in the couple of months before heading out on this ride, and the extent of my practice had been riding to and from work on a level bike path, unloaded. Needless to say, I walked some hills.

Mas'ade, the second of four Druze towns in the Golan; a pool sitting in a caldera, and at lower right, the

cabins belonging to the village of Nimrod, where I volunteered at the ecolodge for a month once

Down Hermon's slopes to the west: oak woods, Nimrod's Castle, the Hula Valley, and Lebanese hilltops

Hamlet of Nimrod in its scenic hilltop surroundings

Conditions could have been better for photography on this trip - the first few days were foggy and overcast

Sometime between 2011 and 2014, someone began installing these informational signposts every few km

along the trail. They're handy enough, although tacky and excessive if you ask me. They do show distances,

which is nice, but their attempts to indicate amenities are cryptic and there's no key. Several different

symbols look like they'd probably indicate "campground," but there's no way to know which means

what...

Also, a third of the way through the trail, they abruptly stop appearing. I'm assuming that, like so many

trail-related hard infrastructure projects here, the funding ran out or someone stopped caring enough

to finish the job

This pond shrinks considerably by summer's end; it's more or less full now

Drawing further and further away from the mountain. Heading north on this trail would mean being

treated to mountain views for the last few days, but I was going south

First night of camping - my small, cozy lair with reading material and plant-identification guide at left

Standard Israeli camping spot: a field just outside a moshav, with scrubby trees as a backdrop and the

sound of roosters and random alarms going off all night

What with my lack of daylight hours on the first day, I overestimated my ability to cover ground and make it to a town to camp near water. I got myself turned around on a mess of intersecting 4x4 tracks as darkness fell, and finally resigned myself to a lengthy detour to asphalt, down and back up a giant hill, to get to Odem. As it happened, the gates were locked, preventing my access to a water refill. Exhausted and not feeling like waiting for a car to come by to open them, I just set up my tent in a field off the road and collapsed; I got water in the morning and continued on my way, hoping for better luck to come.

Snow is such a rare sight here (well, except for the brutal December 2013 snowstorm that brought

all civilization from Amman to Jerusalem to an unceremonious halt) that I couldn't get enough views of

the relatively meager strip of Hermon that was coated in it

I'm fairly certain this view features in at least one piece of Biblical poetry or imagery, although I couldn't

say which one

Sadly, the Golan's most impressive terrain tapers off relatively quickly into wooded plains rippling with,

then further south, punctured by, the odd volcanic hill. The views are less breathtaking, but at least the

riding is easier on a pair of legs that had hardly rotated pedals in two months previous to this trip

Spring here means a selection of wildflowers - including, sometimes, a species I can't find in the little

"Flowers of Israel" identification brochure I brought along

A ludicrously steep slope (I walked it and still practically wiped out) heading straight toward Syria

Nature-loving Israelis tend toward rapture when discussing the Golan; other than the desert, it's certainly

their broadest expanse of uninhabited land. Of course, there's no escaping the cattle wherever you go

And of course it's no wilderness. People have been building on it for millennia and plenty of the leftovers

are still there

A sample of the more rideable sections of trail

Old army trenches overlooking the Syrian front have been quaint relics every other time I've hiked past

them. As of this writing (September 2014) the UN forces are pulling out of the Quneitra crossing, and

this old infrastructure may go back to its former use as chaos continues to fester in Syria's civil war

The extensive minefields in the Golan are more or less all fenced off now, but here more than in other

places, you really want to to keep to the trail. As Israel's trail system developed, the Golan was one of the

first areas (after the Judean Desert and Eilat Mountains) to have a trail network marked; the danger of

hikers stumbling into mines provided the impetus

Second night's accommodation - the "campsite" in someone's backyard, Alonei haBashan. Rather than

roosters, the soundtrack for the night was booms from distant Syrian battles. Maybe my most eerie

night of camping, though at the time I took the noises for IDF exercises...

Night two: I arrived at Alonei haBashan, where the informational signposts described above suggested that there was some sort of campground available (or at least, that was my best guess as to what they meant). I rolled into the moshav, which was crawling with kids, and asked the first adult I met where the campground was. He showed me the way to what turned out to be not a campground, but his backyard - classic informal trail-angel hospitality.

Enough people hike through here that the locals are used to it, and a lot of them make these sorts of offers - I remember coming here while hiking the trail and having a similar experience. However, this guy had never seen anyone full-on bikepacking the route. To my surprise (given the crappy terrain) he did say a lot of people rode it, but never while carrying overnight gear. I suppose an unloaded bike (and one with suspension, which is the only kind of bike Israelis are aware that you can ride off-road) is a lot easier to haul over all the spiky volcanic rock than the rigid, loaded Troll is...

This volcanic plateau does not take kindly to cyclists - at least not along this ungroomed route. Terrain like

this had me walking or detouring far more often than I'd have liked

An extraordinarily thick fog greeted me in the morning - given that the views on these plains wouldn't

have been much anyway, I really enjoyed the otherwordly feeling of rolling through the mist

An unusually rideable bit of 4x4, interrupted by puddle. Enough to forget you're in a region known for

its aridity

Into one of the last hopelessly rocky, cow-trodden hike-a-bike sessions before the landscape was to change...