Jabal al-Lawz is 2,580 metres of granite near the Jordanian border, the highest ground in northern Arabia, and the height is the whole story: it holds what the desert below never gets. Cold fronts sliding south off the Mediterranean reach far enough to whiten these ridges for a few days most winters, and some years bring only a dusting. When it lands, Tabuk drives up. A paved road takes the flank in long steep switchbacks, past juniper and bare granite into fog if a front has just cleared. It stops below the peak, which a fenced military post keeps shut. What you get instead is the view west, out over the sandstone towers of the Hisma desert. Families pitch tents beside the four-wheel drives, spread patterned carpets straight over the white ground and put a pot on. Nobody is dressed for it and everybody is out in it. Further along the rough tracks, Bedouin camel herds graze the frosted scrub with snow settling on their backs, and the herders wave you past.
Most people come for the snow, but what you climb into lower down is older. Between roughly 1,300 and 2,200 metres the slopes carry open groves of Phoenician juniper, low and gnarled, with wild olive and pistachio among them. This is woodland left from a cooler, wetter Arabia, stranded on this one massif because it is high enough to keep the moisture the ground below lost. A needle crushed between your fingers on a cold morning smells of resin. A handful of writers have argued that the biblical Mount Sinai stands here rather than in Egypt. The claim points at a neighbouring peak whose dark summit is read as fire-scorched rock, and geologists identify that stone as hornfels, which is simply that colour. The name means the mountain of almonds. One of its rarest plants is a wild relative of the almond, endangered across its whole range and hanging on here on west-facing slopes, where shade and mist hold a pocket of air cooler and damper than anything below.