Saudi Arabia is a country with the rarest wild caves. Its caves have great exploration potential with unsurpassed beauty that provides unending curiosity to a caver.
Ain Heet cave or Dahl Heet is one such with an underground lake in its interior chambers. Ain Heet cave (other variants of the name are Hith, Heeth, or Hit) situates at the face of Mount Al Jubayl in Wadi As Sulay in a small village called Heet in Riyadh. Between Riyadh and Al Kharj road, it is one of the easily accessible caves in the vicinity of Riyadh.
The isolated part of Heet with Mount Al Jubayl in the background. An old and desolated pump house in the picture could be a landmark for one to identify the location of the cave. The coordinates of the location are N: 24 29’09.6; E:046 59’48.2.
You get an exit to ‘Heet’ which is about 40km from Riyadh City Center (on the Al Kharj highway) going towards Al Kharj. About 5km from Heet Exit towards east on an off-road takes you to this entrance of the cave. The wide entrance of the cave gets bigger and bigger as you go close to it.
Face of Ain Heet Cave.
The mouth of Ain Heet cave is about 20 meters wide and it narrows down to approximately 5 meters while you cave a distance of 100 meters inside.
Once at the seeming end of the cave, turning to your left, a narrow passage can be seen. Struggling through the rock openings revealed very interesting pathways and rock formations.
Like most cave systems, Ain Heet cave too is formed in the limestone by dissolving the anhydrite minerals inside. It was said to be the area where the oil explorers found the first surface outcrop of anhydrite minerals in Saudi Arabia. Most part of the entrance seems fragile and freshly downed limestone pieces were found at the entrance.
The cave is named Ain Heet where ‘Ain’ means ‘eye’. Once inside the cave, the meaning of ‘Ain’ gets clear that the entrance is very close to the shape of an eye.
The cave is 45 degrees down. The loose boulders in the ground make the descending a bit difficult. Sharp boulders throughout the way is a difficult climb. Watch out for the rocks before stepping on it as the boulders are not so fixed to the ground.
Sedimentary rock layers on the walls of the cave.
Till the visible end of the cave, you have plenty of space to walk around and the light gets narrower until you are totally in darkness. Once the glow of sunlight ends, a narrow hole leads you to one of the chambers of the cave with literally no light. That is going to be a wide room with a deep underground lake! The clarity of the water was amazing. How deep you can see depends on how powerful your light source is. If you are a diver, you won’t stop diving in it.
A revisit to the cave one year after in 2013 gave us less adventure but more surprise as the water level raised more than 15-20 meters in height. plenty of light and space to swim. It was a wonderful cave bath!
You might have heard of ‘cave diving’ or ‘desert diving’ and this is the right place if you are an experienced cave diver.
The crystal clear waters of this deep underground lake is known to be more than 30 meters in depth and horizontally more than 150 meters in length as this is the maximum distance I was heard of any caver who ventured here. Depending on the intricacy of a cave, caving and diving require proper equipment. Needless to say, proper training is required for caving and diving. Without these, trying your luck will be tragic.
Caving in Saudi Arabia is less popular though this is a marvelous world with full of mystery, surprise, and adventure. Rare minerals, stalactites, and stalagmites in Saudi caves are priceless and need to be preserved.
