If you don’t feel inclined to do the walk to the top of Mount Deborah, you can make your way there via a dirt track about two kilometers in length. Otherwise, from the roundabout, we hikers follow the Israel Trail, which climbs to the summit. About 200 meters onwards there is a wicket gate that allows us to pass through a cattle fence.
The path leads us first through a park-like forest of Tabor oak trees, and we walk along a north-facing slope where the humidity is relatively high. As these are precisely the conditions in which we should expect to find Israeli common oaks (Quercus calliprinos), we can only assume that an earlier common oak woodland was destroyed at some stage, allowing the seeds of Tabor oaks, which are plentiful in the area, to dominate the slope.
However, if we look closely enough, we can nonetheless observe here and there small specimens of common oak. In winter and springtime wildflowers, including bee orchids and other orchid species, bloom in profusion, and throughout the year Syrian marjoram (Origanum syriacum), thorny burnet (Sarcopoterium spinosum), spiny hawthorn (Crataegus azarolus) and mastic trees (Pistacia lentiscus) are greatly in evidence.
Two hundred and fifty meters further on we come to a copse of Jerusalem pines (Pinus halepensis) that KKL-JNF has planted on the hillside, and directly afterwards we arrive at a woodland path where we turn right and then immediately left, following the Israel Trail markings. Here we climb for about half a kilometer until we come to a dirt road, which we also cross. The appearance of Canary Island pines (Pinus canariensis) indicates that we are nearing the summit, which is entirely ringed by a broad dirt road. When we arrive, we shall have successfully negotiated an altitude gain of around 140 meters.