In honor of Memorial Day in the US, we decided to do a Monday hike (that and the fact that the Seiferas had a busy travel schedule for the last few weeks). They had a wedding up north in the evening so we made the hike a little shorter than the original plan. I had to find a minyan to say kaddish so we couldn't (and it will be like this all year) start as early as we had become accustomed. It's a good thing we shortened the hike because it took a lot longer than we expected. According to Google maps the hike would be 20.6 kilometers starting from Kfar Chasidim and near the Western end of Carmel Park.
The hike started off easy enough and we were going at a nice clip. We covered about 2600 steps in our first full half hour. When walking fast on regular streets with no break by myself, I usually get about 3500 steps in a half hour so 2600 isn't bad. Then we went through a tunnel under highway 75 and the hike got a little harder as we entered Carmel Park. It still wasn't bad yet though and we had a little reprieve when we got to Isfiya (a small Druze town in the middle of the Carmel).
Once we got out of Isfiya though we were climbing mountains. We had what seemed to me to be our most sustained steep hike (in my memory only Har Arbel was close but that didn't go on for as long) and we definitely slowed down considerably (down to about 1600 steps per half hour). The problem was that what goes up must come down. The best for the downhills is when it's not a steep decline. You get the benefit of the downhill without the fear or difficulty of climbing down. This was decidedly not gradual and it was difficult. In some places they had bars or rails which made it much easier. Other places were difficult and very scary for some of us. We went really slowly down the cliffs and in our last full half hour we covered only 820 steps. For most of the hike, I walked with Shira and Gershon walked with Ahuva (we usually do men together and women together and usually we're within earshot of each other). The Greenstones were much slower on the hike down and the Seiferas' got to the car at least fifteen minutes before we did.
The hike ended up taking us about eight hours (we ended up walking about 24 kilometers - even if we only covered 20.6 of the trail). Gershon and Ahuva didn't have time to drive to their hotel in Herzliya to shower before the wedding so my sister Adina was kind enough to host them in Zichron for showers.
We don't stop to look at sites for more than a few seconds but did get a picture with a cannon that was used in the late '60s. We do stop to talk to people though (apparently I'm outvoted 3-1 on that). We saw more shvil hikers than we've seen before. On Fridays, we often see big groups who do the shvil in parts like we do but don't see many individuals or small groups doing the entire hike in one shot. This time we saw a few and stopped to talk to some of them also. In particular we saw two single guys who were each doing the hike from the south to the north so they were almost 80% done and they were doing it alone. Probably left shortly after Pesach to finish before the summer makes it impossible. Nice guys and we had fun talking to them (even if it was for much longer than I'd have wanted).
It was not a very exciting animal sighting day. We saw some horses right at the beginning and then not much of anything. I did see two snakes - one of them was huge - but nobody else saw them. We saw only one cow and we were not close to it at all. Lots of birds and a few lizards but that was it.
