A Four Wheel Drive Trip In the Desert

A Four Wheel Drive Trip in the Desert

May 11,2017

During our stay at the Dead Sea we took a ride in four wheel drives up Mount Sedom, a hill that is made up almost entirely of halite or rock salt.  It's namesake is Sodom of the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is 226 meters above the Dead Sea but still 70 meters below sea level.

We started our trip driving through a wadi, or dried river bed.

There were a few scattered plants in the wadi, but none on the hillsides.

The views of the hills along the way were spectacular.

We rounded a bend into a ravine and stopped to learn about the hillside.  The driver of the lead car taught us that the whole mountain on our left consisted of salt, often covered with a layer of dried clay.

The streaking in the clay surfaces illustrated below indicate that the salt is barely covered.

We also were able to see the mountain of salt close up.

Then we travelled around several bends and into another wadi.

 We followed road markers: 

and signs:

and ascended to the mountain top overlook.

The view of the Dead Sea was amazing.

These two photos show cranes harvesting salt and minerals.

This one shows a device in the water extracting minerals and transporting them to the covered shed.

We posed for a picture.

Afterward we went down the mountain onto the main road and made a quick trip to see a huge potash factory, which processes the mineral from the Dead Sea.

Along the roadside there were naturally formed beds of potash.

Then we went to see "Lot's Wife." In the Bible, Lot's wife is a figure first mentioned in Genesis 19. Lot and his family made their home in the city of Sodʹom. The people of Sod'om were evil. This upset Lot, because he was a good man. God was upset too. Finally, God sent two angels to warn Lot that he was going to destroy Sodʹom and the nearby city of Gomorʹrah because of their wickedness.

The angels told Lot: ‘Hurry! Take your wife and your two daughters and get out of here!’ Lot and his family were a little slow in going, and so the angels took them by the hand and led them out of the city. Then one of the angels said: ‘Run for your lives! Don’t look back. Run to the hills, so that you won’t be killed.’

Lot and his daughters obeyed and ran away from Sodʹom. They didn’t stop for a moment, and they didn’t look back. But Lot’s wife disobeyed. After they had gone some distance from Sodʹom, she stopped and looked back. Then she became a pillar of salt. 

We wer able to see the pillar of salt that represents Lot's wife jutting out from a hillside.

 The lower ⅔ of the pillar is solid salt with a thin crust of clay

Then we reentered the back country through Wadi Zohar.  Down the wadi, about 2.5 km from the Dead Sea, lies a Roman fortress with Byzantine and Mamluk additions. The tower of the fortress was built on top of a natural hill and is well preserved.

A lower fortress protects a second fork of the Wadi.

Dams were built across the Wadi to catch rainwater, which was preserved in cisterns.

We stopped in the shade of some trees in the Wadi for a picnic lunch.

After lunch, we drove out of the Wadi back to our hotel on the edge of the Dead Sea.  Many of us went for a swim, which was more like a float, in the Dead Sea.