Egypt – Gebel Katherina

Gebel Katherina (8,625 ft)

Eric Gilbertson

March 26, 2018

I was in the Mideast for a few weeks of country highpointing, and had just finished climbing Qurnat as Sawda, the Lebanon highpoint. Next on the agenda was a trip to Egypt.

Unfortunately the US State Department had issued a travel advisory advising against all travel to the Sinai Peninsula outside of the Sharm El Sheikh resort, and the highpoint of Egypt, Gebel Katherina, was in the supposed danger zone. I’d read that Gebel Katherina legally required a guide, so Matthew contacted a handful of guides to ask about the security situation in the area.

Most of them said the region was completely safe, and I figured the state department was just being overly conservative. Matthew ended up not being able to join, but I arranged for a guide Ragab (darbsina@gmail.com) to get me transportation from Sharm el Sheikh to the trailhead, and be the guide for the hike.

I landed in Sharm on March 25 in the afternoon, and met a driver outside holding a sign with my name on it. We started driving north, and after passing through a few police checkpoints stopped for a break just outside Dahab. Next we turned west and drove into the interior of the peninsula.

The scenery was amazing, with huge rocky mountains poking out of the desert in all directions and camels walking

along the side of the road. We passed through a few more police checkpoints, and by sunset reached St Catherine village.

My guide, Ragab, met me at the Bedouin Camp hotel, and we discussed the plan for the next day over dinner of

chicken and rice. Ragab had been guiding in the area for the past 20 years, and just finished a 5-day trip with a group of Germans. It sounded like there were plenty of tourists in the area, and that the only real security concern was in the northern Sinai Peninsula, far away from St Catherine.

The next morning I met Ragab at his house at 7am, and after some pita bread and eggs we started hiking. Ragab wanted to take me on a longer and less direct, but more interesting route up Gebel Katherina, so we ascended a steep valley southwest of town, then hiked and scrambled through dried stream beds.

After a few hours we crested a ridge just north of the summit, and converged with the normal route. We hiked up switchbacks, then walked steeply up a set of steps to the summit. A small religious building had been built on the top, and an small shelter nearby that Ragab said some groups sleep in overnight to see sunrise from the top.

Gebel Katherina actually has two peaks, a northern one and a southern one, that are very similar elevations. We were on the northern one, but I’d read that the southern one was actually slightly taller.

Ragab said it was ok if I went over to tag the southern one while he waited for me at the northern one. I jogged down the trail, then hiked up an old abandoned jeep road to a dilapidated rock structure on the southern summit. According to Ragab, when Israel invaded Egypt in 1967 they bulldozed a road up to this summit and built a communications facility. They left around 1980, but the structure still exists, and is in pretty bad shape.

With a successful summit attained, I met back up with Ragab and we started hiking down the normal route. We stopped around 1pm to eat some lunch, and Ragab made a small fire to heat up tea. It seemed awfully early in the day to be finished hiking, so I suggested we hike up Mt Sinai (aka Gebel Musa), which was nearby. This is supposedly where Moses got the ten commandments, and looked like a fun hike.

We had plenty of daylight, so we hiked up most of the way to the top, then Ragab took a break and said I could finish the rest by myself. While we were the only people on Gebel Katherina, there were over 100 people hiking Mt Saini. I jogged up the stairs to the summit, and passed lots of trash and people selling trinkets. There was a great view on the top looking across the valley back to Gebel Katherina.

I jogged back down, past other hikers, and then we hiked back down a different valley to make things interesting. We passed a bunch of tourists riding camels up to see sunrise from the summit. By sunset we reached a parking lot outside a 4^th century monastery, and took a taxi back to town.

The next morning I rode back to Sharm el Sheikh and flew out to Jordan for the next leg of my trip.