Ein Zik is an oasis located in a horseshoe valley surrounded on three sides by towering cliffs. Rainwater runs down and through the cliffs and is trapped in this basin close to the surface, a large, soggy underground lake (the technical name for this is ‘layer spring’). The Israel trail goes through it.
Walking there and back from our guesthouse (Sde Boker being the closest settlement) would be a very long hiking day, therefore it is most accessible by jeep (about 40 minutes).
The palms trees are not properly indigenous, someone planted them intentionally or dropped a date pip unintentionally no one knows how long ago and the conditions clearly favor them; measured in biomass it is by far the biggest oasis in the Negev Highland.
The Euphrates Poplar [Pupulus Euphratica] tree is indigenous and grows here in numbers; the Pupulus Euphratica of Ein Zik and Ein Shaviv baffle the experts because they have certain unique properties with which I will not bore you.
It is home to all manner of fauna which are hidden during the day. Ein Zik also has some history; the archaeologist Jacob Vardi wrote his masters thesis about the people who lived here in the Middle Bronze Age and the remains of their settlement are there for you to see, but no one can tell me exactly where and I haven’t found it so far, perhaps you will have better luck.
How to get there.
You will need a 4×4 vehicle (and a guide if you are not familiar with the desert): Set out from the guesthouse, drive north on route 40 for one kilometer, turn right and cross the kibbutz fields until you pick up the oil pipeline road.
There is a sharp descent into the Zin Valley
and then you drive in a straight line for 20 minutes and for the entire length of this section you will seriously doubt that you are on the right road because it is nothing but barren desert as far as the eye can see.
[You will notice an ugly vertical gash in the cliff directly ahead of you; this is an oil pipeline running from Eilat to Ashkelon, a white elephant built in the 1960’s to bypass the blocked Suez Canal.]
You will come to a sign Ein Zik to your right and as you make that turn you will start to see the patches of dark green in the near distance. Continue driving past the official campsite on your right and down an incline into the jungle which is Ein Zik.
You follow this dirt road for about one kilometer – some skill is required to get through –
until you come to a barrier and this is Ein Shaviv, you can drive no further.
Unload the picnic hamper and continue on foot for about ten minutes
and you come to a leafy grove of Pupulus Euphratica which is cool and spacious
and here you will meet the Israel Trail.
After the picnic, having seen Ein Zik following the black or the green trail, you can return in the 4×4 to the village or you can send the 4×4 away and make a spectacular 4-5 hour hike back to the guesthouse via Ein Akev.
Not many people visit this place
Firstly it is an oasis with no surface water, no waterfall, no pool to cool your feet, nowhere for the kiddies to splash about. There are almost no shaded areas in which to sit or lie down or picnic. There is just one trail that runs through the length of it. 30 clusters of tall, robust palm trees (maybe 500 trees on total )but you can’t get near them because their trunks are clogged with a mass of dead palm fronds and impenetrable undergrowth.
The second reason so few people visit Ein Zik is its inaccessibility. The nearest village is ours, a good 40 minute drive away or a three hour hike. It is accessible from Mitzpe Ramon but only by foot; four hours on foot.
I have a neighbor in the village who goes out into the desert every weekend with his family and he loves Ein Zik excessively. I asked him. ” Why don’t we develop this spring so that more people will come here?” He looked at me in disbelief and the smallest amount of irritation. “Why would you want thousands of Israelis coming here and ruining this place, it is perfect as it is.”
Nature is wonderful, people are horrible and Israelis are the worst, one hears it all the time. So Ein Zik must be unwelcoming and inaccessible to ordinary families but heaven for eco-purists and botanists in Jeeps.
Ein Zik is begging for a make-over, it could be one of Israel’s most spectacular National Parks. Three experts: a horticulturalist, a hydrologist and a landscape architect need to get in there with a modest budget to sort this place out. I agree with my neighbor, we don’t want it overrun with quads and motorized campers so we do not build a paved road from route 40 to Ein Zik. We leave it as it is, isolated and inaccessible with a vehicular quarantine of 4 km which means that if you want to see Ein Zik it is a minimum one hour walk in and a one hour walk back to your car (disabled visitors excepted) and with a crew of rangers to protect this place as they do in every National Park in Israel.
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Lovely and good descreption of this area…