Jebel Jais is the highest mountain in the United Arab Emirates, 1,934 metres of bare grey limestone in the Hajar range. The air at the top runs about ten degrees cooler than the desert below. That difference is the whole reason you drive up. Nothing here looks like the country's sand. The rock began as lime mud on an ancient seabed, and the collision that built the range pushed it into ridges with the fossils still in them. The road is flawless asphalt and switchbacks the entire way, each hairpin opening more of the stacked grey summits and the plain below. The climb gives you as much of the day as the top does. It ends at terraced viewpoints where the range fans out to the horizon. Low light is what they are for: in the early morning or the last hour the ridges throw long shadows and separate into layer after layer of receding peaks.
Marked trails leave the road for the bare ridges, from short viewpoint loops to longer routes. Some stretches carry steel rungs, ladders and a fixed cable, so you can clip on and cross rock that would otherwise want climbing skill. Up there the only sounds are wind and gravel, and the desert haze thins into clean air. The mountain's other line is a cable. Riders on the Jais Flight are clipped in head-first and launched off the mountainside, flying flat for 2.8 kilometres across an open valley at up to 150 kilometres an hour. That is nearly three minutes with nothing underneath but air. From November to March the summit turns genuinely cold, with nights near freezing and frost on the sharpest mornings, and a few times a decade snow dusts the high ridges and the whole country drives up to look at it. Even an ordinary evening does the same thing in miniature. The ridges keep the light after the valleys have gone dark, and by the time the sun is down you are in a jacket at the railing, looking out at a plain that is still warm.