American Independence Park

We had such a lovely hike here! Started at the Bar BaHar restaurant, which has a ton of information about trails and sites in the area (and also great pizzas and salads, which we had when we got back from our hike - kitchen closed at 17:30 so don't get there too late).

We did a lovely loop trail down into Nahal Ktalev and back out again (we indeed saw some of the bright orange Ktalev trees it's named after), with fantastic views of the Jerusalem hills, Nahal Soreq, and the old Bar Giora train station. The trail passed through some Mamluk and Crusader era ruins, as well as a scenic underpass. The bottom of the trail was very shady and pleasant. Took us about 4 hours overall. We're planning to come back again with kids to walk a shorter trail to Beit Itab ruins.