Jebel Rimhan | Go Tell It on the Mountain

December 17, 2014

Jebel Rimhan: a sleeping giant

Jebel Rimhan was once a complete obsession of a mountain for me. It struck me the first time I saw it; more than any other peak in the Sinai. I was on my way to Jebel Umm Shomer and it was there in the dawn; its huge, twin peaks rising in the morning haze; each a perfect pyramid. Behind it, the Hejaz lined the horizon along the coast of Arabia. I saw it from a lot of other places after that. And wherever it appeared – from whatever angle – it looked just as beautiful; just as majestic. Jebel Rimhan is one of the Sinai’s biggest peaks at 2437m; but unlike other big peaks here – like Umm Shomer, Thebt and Serbal – it didn’t have an established route on it, which just added to the allure.

The first – and only – recorded ascent I know of was made nearly 100 years ago, by George W Murray, a highland Scot who worked on the British Survey of Egypt.

Talking about recorded anythings is always dubious in a place like Sinai, whose people were historically one of the spoken word, never putting anything on paper. But Murray had climbed mountains all over the Sinai, he knew the Bedouin well and – even then – reckoned the ‘maiden pikes of Rimhan, the Two Lances’ were unscaled; either in recorded or unrecorded terms.

Whatever the story, he didn’t go with a local Bedouin. He went with a Bedouin from the mountains of mainland Egypt – Ali Kheir – who found the way from scratch. Murray found it such a tough route to follow that – as a mark of gratitude and respect – he bought his guide the best cross-handled sword he could find when they got back to Cairo; a prized relic from the Battle of Omdurman.

Unfortunately, Murray didn’t record specifics of the route they did that day.

I spent years asking around, trying to find someone who knew the way. There were plenty of folks who reckoned they knew it; but none of them were ever available. I gave it the first go in winter of 2012 with a Bedouin guide called Auda; an ageing talkaholic in white plimsolls and a baggy coat down to his knees. I’d walked with him before – to Jebel Umm Shomer – and found it totally exhausting. Not the walk. All the talking. I like silence in the mountains. I don’t like to talk; or even think through language.

I just like to exist. To see stuff. To feel things.

Auda was the enemy of silence itself. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he’d just whoop, or scream. He’d be a challenge on a par with the mountain itself but if he knew the way – and he said he did – it was a fair price to pay.

Half way up he stopped on a high promontory, leant back in a limbo like pose and bellowed up at the sky – with a celebratory edge – ‘MAFEESH TAREEEEEEEEEEG! Which was to say, no way. He was right too. A huge ravine sliced the mountain in half. Getting down into it wasn’t the only problem. We’d have to climb out the other side onto the summit section; a mass of smooth, bulging granite, towering up hundreds of metres. The whole thing looked frightening. Cracks, cuts and black lines ran through the crags, like scars on an ancient face. Jebel Rimhan was like a giant’s head, sleeping and ready to wake.

Auda didn’t seem bothered. He just stood there, bellowing.

Walking back that day felt like a failure; I kept turning round, wanting to go back. Looking at the mountain; thinking we should have tried the last crags. That we should’ve been bolder or braver. Or found another way. That we should have gambled. That we should have just done it without thinking. For weeks afterwards – when I went back to downtown Cairo – I saw Jebel Rimhan when I closed my eyes; like its twin peaks had been photographically exposed on my retina. They appeared in the darkness, like a silhouette; the specks and phosphenes floating over them.

It was a year before I got another chance to do it; going back in 2013. And the second time was even more of an unmitigated failure than the first, ending when I thought my guide was having a heart attack after the first pass.

He wasn’t – hamduleleh – but something wasn’t right. So we bailed.

On the way back we met a local Bedouin who said he’d been up. He was an elderly guy called Salem who set a princely sum for guiding me, which I paid only to avoid having to break the news of another failure back in town.

We made a dawn raid, shooting straight for the summit on a dragon’s back type ridge. The Sinai doesn’t have many ridges; not like the glaciated ranges of Europe, with their knife edge arêtes and cirques. Occasionally, a geological quirk creates one in the landscape though; and most of the time, they’re gems. This was one of the best; bristling with high fins of rock you had to weave between all the way along. About half way up the ridge, the summit suddenly appeared. I got a sudden burst of hope, thinking we’d do it; third time lucky. Further up though, Salem sat down on a rock and got his binoculars out; an ominous sign.

We could see an impenetrable looking thimble of crags at the end.

We went up to look. Sure enough though; they were too high, too tricky and serious for a pair of scramblers – looking for a scrambler’s route up – like us. We’d got higher than ever. Just below the top. We weren’t there; but it wasn’t totally wasted. Getting this far showed us the peak we’d been centering on – the northerly one of the twin peaks – wasn’t actually the highest.

As it transpired, Salem didn’t know the way up Jebel Rimhan. He’d said he did, gambling and hoping it’d unfold as we got up.

And all that talk is a big part of Jebel Rimhan for me. Down in the towns; in the tents, by the fires, where everything’s comortable and everybody can just talk without ever showing anything for it, people know the way. Everyone’s an expert. Press them on the specifics though – especially when you’ve been on the mountain – and you’ll see it’s all totally empty. It mirrors the way mountain knowledge is getting moth eaten across the Sinai too. Bedouin knowledge – hard won by earlier generations – is gradually being forgotten. And knowledge of the mountain tops is the worst hit; it’s been the first to go of everything on the peninsula.

It’s partly because the Bedouin inhabit a new, modern world in which mountain knowledge is irrelevant. They don’t need it any more. Especially nothing about the high mountain tops. Why would they? Wadis are still highways in the mountains; so they still get talked about. They’re still better known.

In some ways, the empty, feigned knowledge about Jebel Rimhan is sad to me.

As much as it’s a charade born from bravado, I think it’s born from a feeling they should know the mountains better. Especially in front of an outsider; I think it’s born of a feeling that something precious has been lost. And that they’re the generation that lost it; that they’re responsible the knowledge that set them aside from anybody else; the knowledge that made them Bedouin – rather than anything else – is waning. And it’s waning on their watch.

Anyway, after that third time, I gave up on people who said they knew the way.

I went back again in summer 2014 with a guy called Salem Abu Ramadan; the fittest Bedouin I know; and one of the best climbers and routefinders. We began early, heading for the higher peak; the one we’d spotted from the last attempt. I didn’t have high hopes; it looked even harder than the other. I was just there because I couldn’t rest easy until I’d tried everything I could on Jebel Rimhan.

We spent the morning creeping round the mountain like a pair of assassins trying to get into a forbidden castle. We started up a ravine that ended in a cul de sac. After that, we tried smaller gully with a rojom – a trail marking stone – in it. It was the first rojom I’d seen on Jebel Rimhan. A a sure sign someone had been here before. Maybe it was an old route marker. We followed it, then found a line of them that ended below a high, sheer wall we couldn’t pass.

We were running out of options. The last chance we had was a ravine that we’d avoided in the morning because a huge boulder was wedged half way up, blocking it. But we gave it a go: there was nothing else.

Getting round the block turned out easy. Big views soon unlocked over the landscape as we got higher and the towering crags soon began to taper off. At the end of the ravine we scrambled onto a ridge.

We looked left, and there it was. The summit. No big crags. No big obstacles.

The ridge – flanked by massive drops – ran up to it. We followed it along – crossing a few wobbly boulders, one of which groaned like it was about to plunge off – to reach the top. It felt lik hallowed ground. Finally, after all the years, we were there. We could see the other peak – the object of our three failures – and behind it Jebel Umm Shomer. The Sinai unfolded all around, looking beautiful. Where it ended, the summits of Africa stood up across the sea; with the mountains of Arabia on the other. It was one of the most spectacular sights I’d seen in the Sinai; almost as beautiful as the twin peaks of Jebel Rimhan itself. As much as it felt good to be on the top, part of me felt sad the story was over. That there wouldn’t be another mountain like it.

Not such an epic, forgotten and mysterious a peak as Jebel Rimhan.

The best thing about doing it wasn’t getting there. It was finding a good way up. A way anybody could do. It was winning back that lost knowledge about one of the Sinai’s biggest, most beautiful peaks. Jebel Rimhan is a sleeping giant of a peak; I hope this route we did might begin to make it wake because this is a mountain that deserves a place alongside the Sinai’s other great summits.

If you want to try the mountain, I can guarantee this guy knows the way, as we went together. Salem Abu Ramadan: 0101-497-6289.

September 22, 2014

Jebel Thebt: a Sinai giant

Jebel Thebt is one of Sinai’s biggest peaks. Compared with the other big mountains though, it doesn’t get hiked much. That’s partly because it’s so isolated and hard to get to. Wherever you start, it’s a long walk in. You can knock the first few kilos off with a jeep but even then there’s a day’s walk to the mountain afterwards. As much as the isolation, its popularity was limited by the fact it wasn’t mixed up with the Biblical legend that made other mountains so famous. It never really got visited, talked-about, or put down on the map by early explorers. Not like other peaks did. Anyway, I hope more hikers start doing this one day. Because it’s a big, brooding giant of a peak that deserves better; one of the Sinai’s classic adventures, with some of its most stunning views.

The Bedouin climbed Jebel Thebt ages ago. The first European ascent I know of was made by the Rev F.W Holland in 1867. I meant to do it in 2012 but ran out of time trying to find a way up a nearby peak called Jebel Rimhan.

I finally got round to it again in the depths of winter 2014, going with a chain-smoking Bedouin of the Jebeleya tribe, called Musa.

We walked in from St Katherine and slept the first night in Wadi Tarfa; an old travelling passage between the Monastery of St Katherine and El Tur. It was absolutely freezing and everything was white with frost in the morning – Musa included. He was in one of those flimsy-type sleeping bags you’d take to Glastonbury or T-in the Park or something; doubled up with his knees to his chest, not moving. Half-worried he’d frozen to death, I nudged him which made him suddenly sit bolt upright, like a jack in the box. He stared at me a few seconds, then the fire, then me again; all with the confused look of a man who’d totally forgotten where he actually went to sleep.

We’d both overslept by a couple of hours. Which meant getting to Jebel Thebt and back in the couple of days we had was going to be tough.

Normally, to get to Jebel Thebt, you’d keep walking down Wadi Tarfa. Musa had a shortcut in mind though, which was just as well; because we’d never have got there the normal way. Not before sunset, anyway. And the last thing I wanted was to be stuck out on a big peak I didn’t know in the cold depths of a Sinai winter (according to one early climber, a Bedouin guide got frostbite on a mountain near Jebel Thebt in 1898). We clambered out of Wadi Tarfa and went over low, rocky hills. Sure enough, Musa’s shortcut was spot on. Jebel Thebt soon appeared on the horizon. Still huge. STILL faraway. It’s that highest, most distant peak on the left in the picture above. We went down to a wadi – Wadi Thebt – and began a long uphill slog to the bottom of the mountain.

I’d be going alone now. Me and Musa had already agreed he’d sit the climb out.

Looking at it now though, I sort of wished I’d persuaded him to come. It still looked massive. And difficult. And there wasn’t much time left.

Getting up Jebel Thebt is a two-step process. You follow the last stretch of Wadi Thebt up to a high pass. Then you turn and make a beeline straight for the top. It sounds easy but it’s a bit tricky in a rush.

There are no good trails. It’s hard to see where you’re going. You start on one side of the wadi. But further on, big crags block it. You can cross to the other side, but there are huge scree slopes here. And not the sort of scree slopes whose bulges have been flattened out by hundreds of hikers’ feet. Or lined with nice neat trails. Precarious scree slopes that feel like they’re going to slide out from under your feet at any moment, sweeping you away in an avalanche of rubble. If these scree slopes have ONE redeeming feature though it’s that they’re where a few rojoms – trail-marking stones – appear on the mountain for the first time.

Rojoms mark the way in hard-to-navigate parts of the Sinai. And they give you that important psychological security of knowing you ARE on the right trail. If you’re ever in a tricky place like this in the Sinai and you know the exact route, DO build them. Obviously, if you don’t; don’t. The last thing anybody needs is to be led off on a meandering, dead-man’s trail in places like this.

Anyway, after this scree, you get to the pass, where there’s an old leopard trap.

Jebel Thebt towers up here as a big mass of shattered, intimidating crags. But the rojoms continue, marking a line all the way: it twists up gullies, crosses terraces and then finally weaves through the high cliffs to the summit. Up here there’s a metal barrel. The Bedouin say the British put it here long ago. Maybe as a trig point. And the view here is amazing. You see mountains you don’t see anywhere else in the Sinai. You can gaze over the sea to Jebel Gharib in mainland Egypt too. Then the other way, to Jebel Loz and the high ranges of the Hijaz.

I wanted to stay longer, but my clothes were wet with sweat, going so fast; after just a few minutes in the summit wind I was shivering in big violent shakes.

I went down as fast as I could, getting back just before dusk.

I met Musa coming the other way and we began walking out down Wadi Thebt again. Further along we found a Bedouin guy in a dwelling below a boulder and went inside, huddling around a fire and listening to the wind outside. Sleeping in boulder dwellings like this is one of the things I love about the Sinai; in other parts of the world you sleep in huts, hostels and lodges; or at least in a tent, with zips and plastic. Here, you sleep in the landscape itself.

There are different ways you can finish from Jebel Thebt. You can walk out to El Tur – through the amazing Wadi Isleh – in 1-2 days. You can go to Ein Kidd in 1-2 days too; a pretty oasis where you can continue to Sharm. Or you can go back to St Katherine. Distance-wise, they’re not that different. Me and Musa went back the St Katherine way. We were supposed to meet a pick-up for the last bit but it didn’t come. We started walking, hoping we’d meet it later. Darkness fell and just as we’d resigned ourselves to a long, overnight walk back two headlights appeared on a high, distant pass. We flashed our torches; they flashed back. For sure, it was our ride. Half an hour later we were in the back of a Toyota pick up, trundling back to St Katherine under the stars. The best thing about Jebel Thebt for me wasn’t the climb. It was that it put so many new mountains on my radar; ones that are still bleeping, which I still want to do.