Rain rarely falls in the desert regions of Israel—that is a commonplace assumption. The Sinai, Negev and the Judean wilderness are so dry that inscriptional materials, such as scrolls, have survived for millennia.
But “rarely” is not “never.” Rain does fall in the desert; a few times a year it may even rain very hard.
The desert is a dangerous place—unless you know how to live in it; it becomes especially so when it rains. During the rainy season from mid-October until the end of March, desert dwellers know not to camp in a wadi.a After a rain, a wadi can become a real river; torrents of water can course through it quickly, drowning any people or flocks caught within its banks. Almost every year desert flash floods kill people who did not keep to the high ground.
Rain in the desert can also be beautiful, as the pictures that accompany this article amply show. To be in the desert during a rain is an awesome experience. A river in the desert may flow for only 15 minutes before it slows to a trickle. Water from a heavy rain collects in the major wadis from all the non-porous surfaces for miles around. Plunging down mountain gorges and over cliffs, spectacular waterfalls form in some wadis.
Rain, little though it may be, is essential to the desert’s ecosystem. The region’s extensive flora and fauna could not survive without it. The spots where a little more water 048flows—for example, beside a road where the runoff may collect, or on a wadi floor—are marked by a line of scrubby green brush. A large bush may grow out of a mountain crevice that collects rain.
When the rain stops, pools of water can remain on the desert floor for days. Some pools are deep within the mountains, hidden from the sun. These water sources can remain clean and cold for months.
A good example of this phenomenon are the pools in the Wadi Barak between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Eilat. Millions of years ago, a winter rain caused a river to form. As the water rushed down to the Aravah, the valley that extends from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Eilat, it cut a curved swath in the desert. Over the millennia, as water rushed around this curve once or twice a year, it carved an increasingly deep crevice into the desert’s soft chalk surface.
The Wadi Barak has several unusual features, some of which you can see in our cover picture. The walls of the wadi gorge are not vertical, and at the bottom the gorge widens or slopes. As you follow the curved path of the gorge floor, the gorge’s “ceiling” curves over your head. When standing on the floor of the narrow canyon, you can look up and see the ceiling curve downward. At the top the light from the sky pours in. The light, however, unlike water, does not follow the curve of the gorge walls: it travels in a straight line. The bottom of the gorge, therefore, is unlit. The top is narrower than the bottom because as the water rushed downward in the curve, its force widened the curve itself. The gorge floor, though wide, is not flat. Boulders, swept along by the water, dug oblong-shaped holes with curved sides in the floor of the gorge. As the water rushes through the gorge, it collects in these holes to form pools.
Since the sunlight cannot get to the pools, no algae grow in them and the water does not evaporate very much. The pools of water remain cool, clear and clean, even in the heat of the summer.
The road adjacent to the Dead Sea continues in a straight line south through the Aravah Valley to Eilat. South of the Dead Sea, there is little but unrelieved heat and barrenness for several hours. A stop at the Wadi Barak—67 kilometers south of the intersection of the Sodom road and the road to Eilat—breaks up the trip to Eilat marvelously. The path of the wadi is easy to find because it is marked by bits of brush. Walk up the wadi until you reach the chalk cliffs, at which point the wadi is transformed into a gorge. Follow the gorge and enjoy a cool swim in the clean pools of the desert wilderness. Be sure, however, never to make the trip when there is the slightest possibility of a deadly flash flood, particularly between October and April. And never camp on a wadi floor.
Rain rarely falls in the desert regions of Israel—that is a commonplace assumption. The Sinai, Negev and the Judean wilderness are so dry that inscriptional materials, such as scrolls, have survived for millennia.
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“Wadi,” the Arab equivalent of the Hebrew term “nahal” is also rendered as “arroyo” in North America. These terms all refer to the kind of dry riverbed or small river commonly found in desert regions.
