Jabal al-Lawz is the highest mountain in northern Arabia, 2,580 metres of granite in the Tabuk region of northwestern Saudi Arabia near the Jordanian border, whitened by snow for a few days most winters, its slopes holding juniper and wild olive left from a wetter age, and it is driven up on switchbacks by families from Tabuk when the snow comes, who spread carpets over the white ground and put a coffee pot on. The mountain crowns a line of six granite bodies that cooled deep underground, were stripped of everything above them and now weather into spires and pinnacles, and its name means the mountain of almonds, for the trees that grew here, one of its rarest plants being a wild relative of the almond; cold fronts sliding down off the Mediterranean push far enough south to whiten the ridges between mid-December and late January, usually for days rather than weeks, and when the snow falls the whole region drives up, tents beside the four-wheel drives, camels grazing the scrub with snow settling on their backs, and children who have never seen snow throwing it. A paved road climbs the flank in long steep switchbacks past juniper and bare granite into fog when a front has just cleared, and runs out below the summit.
The mid-slopes between 1,300 and 2,200 metres carry open groves of juniper, walked into away from the crowds on the high ground, a forest that survives from a time when Arabia was green, and the Bedouin still herd camels along the rough tracks. A handful of writers have argued that the biblical Mount Sinai stands here in Arabia rather than in Egypt, pointing to a blackened summit and rock art of cattle on the slopes below, a claim the archaeologists reject, and the rock art is real, with thousands of engravings across the region. The mountain lies inside the Neom project zone, and access is changing. Jabal al-Lawz is Arabia's snow mountain, and the almonds it was named for have nearly gone.