The Cedars

It was the last stop at the end of our epically busy day driving north from Beirut but we eventually got to the Cedars, best known as a ski slope but of interest to us because of its small reserve of cedar trees.  After some bus trouble, we arrived maybe an hour and a half before sunset.  I'd like you to remember that when you look at my photographs.  Please.

The Cedars is directly above Bcharre, where I spent some time after my hiking trip at the beginning of my time here in Lebanon.  The view from so far up is quite something, but once you know that a thousand years ago all the mountains were covered in cedars, everything starts to look bare.  Beautiful, but bare.

Some factoids: The cedars of Lebanon were mentioned in the Old Testament and were a source of enormous wealth for the Phoenicians, who sold the valuable wood to Egypt and Palestine.  The original Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was built of Lebanese cedar, and so were many Egyptian sarcophagi.

But enough history, back to the this millennium.  Once we got to the reserve at the Cedars, we walked around the whole area in about 20 minutes.  There are not a lot of cedar trees left, and regrowing them is extremely difficult.  They grow very slowly, needing irrigation and care until they are 8 years old, and not producing cones until they are 35-70 years old.  Climate change in Lebanon (I mean this in the sense of climate change through millennia, not the Al Gore type although I'm sure that has affected the region too) has made summers longer and winters shorter, meaning that the trees have to grow for longer and longer times before their roots reach water.

The trees in the park were very dramatic, but Cedars don't look like the tree you see on the Lebanese flag until they are much older.  Here's an old cedar tree:

Some young cedar trees:

There was one tree dedicated to a famous French poet in the reserve that died, so they commissioned a local artist to carve it.  At first, I couldn't imagine what the artist had contributed:

Then I looked a little more closely:

There were images of Christ carved all over this tree's trunk, that was the only one I got a good picture of.

Finally, the reserve from higher up the mountain:

That concludes the cedar portion of this blog.