The temple of Hathor is one of the only two Egyptian temples located outside of Egypt and it is only about 25 minutes away from my kibbutz. It was discovered by accident, at the very end of an archeological dig and wasn’t explored for a few years because it was discovered around the time that Israel received possession of Mt. Sinai, which had priority over a site whose importance no one knew.

For the past few days, I’ve heard about Timna. One friend said she knew someone named after this park. I thought that it had to be an over exaggeration. There was no way a park was so beautiful a person would name their child after some sandstone rock formations. I went in as a skeptic.

We were given a few maps as we drove through the gates of the park. Small cartoon drawings of the rock formations dotted the map, with short captions, giving a brief history of many of the main areas. The cartoons and the stories did not do Timna justice.

We first visited the arch. It was more of a circle than an arch: a great hole worn away in the sandstone from humidity over many hundreds and thousands of years. It was close to the car and not far from the ground, but it would have been too steep to climb without any sort of climbing gear if the park had not placed a ladder to the center. We stopped here to learn about how sandstone is the stage to which granite progresses as the rock ages. The humidity in the air is soaked up by the sandstone and, when the water in the rock heats up, it expands and causes very small holes to form in the rock. As the holes get bigger, they are visible, eventually creating an “arch,” or circle through which people can climb, in the rock.

If I hadn’t been able to explore any other part of Timna, this would have been enough. The rock on the farther end of the stone formation, looked as though it was melting, a feeling I have become familiar with in the scorching sun of the Negev. The pool closes at Lotan in a week and a half because the summer is ending, people say, but it seems just as hot today as it did when I first arrived here. Yesterday the high was around 102 degrees Fahrenheit. If that is cooler than when I first arrived, I don’t want to know what the temperature was on August 31st.

The rest of the hike at Timna was beautiful, yet there was nothing that compared to our first experience with the sandstone, although the mushroom rock was pretty close (the lower portion of the rock erodes much faster than the top half, leaving a mushroom shaped rock standing in the middle of a sandy valley between Mt. Timna and another, smaller mountain).

I have seen many different rock formations, from Israel to New Mexico to Colorado, and Timna has made the top of the list.