The Wadi Rum Trail: Jordan's new long-distance hike

It traces the stunning, extraterrestrial landscape featured in films like Star Wars and Dune, while helping to preserve traditional Bedouin culture.

My Bedouin guide Abdallah led the way up and into the crags of Jebel Umm Ishrin (1,753m), the sheer, eastern wall of Jordan's most spectacular valley: Wadi Rum. Though it's considered one of the world's most breathtaking desert landscapes today, few outsiders had ever heard of Wadi Rum in 1917 when British archaeologist and writer TE Lawrence travelled through, describing this eastern wall as "one massive rampart of redness".

Forty-five years later, his journey inspired the film Lawrence of Arabia, which effectively introduced Wadi Rum to the outside world.

Long before Lawrence, local Bedouin scrambled to dizzying heights on these cliffs, blazing vertiginous paths to needle the mountains' narrowest gaps, reaching their innermost fissures and skirting their dome-capped summits on the hunt for ibex.

As Abdallah and I followed in their footsteps, clambering up the cleft of Umm Ejil (also known as Rakhabat Canyon), the passage narrowed and rock walls popped with weathered niches and delicate natural columns, as if marking the approach to an ancient shrine. Panting, I dropped to a black sandstone bench to rest beside Abdallah. We were deep in the heart of Jebel Umm Ishrin, engulfed in its silence, until a human-like whistle suddenly broke the quiet. I craned my neck to scan the surrounding cliffs. Such high, hidden reaches have long been considered the hideouts of magical jinn (genies).

Abdallah smiled: a starling, he explained. Their two-part whistle is a familiar sound in the surrounding Hisma plateau.

Of the area's hundreds of miles of red-sand desert, the bulk of which stretches beyond the Saudi border, it's Jordan's fortuitous sliver that is by far the best known. It's this stretch, centred on the Unesco-inscribed Wadi Rum Protected Area, that a bewitched Lawrence described as "magically haunted" and "vast and echoing and God-like". In recent decades, this extraterrestrial terrain has served as the backdrop of numerous blockbuster films, including Prometheus (2012), The Martian (2015), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and Dune (2021 and 2024).

It was also here, after years of careful scouting by a group of Bedouin and British friends, that a brand-new long-distance hiking route was unveiled in February 2023: The Wadi Rum Trail. This 10-day, clockwise circuit twists 120km from Jebel Umm Ishrin, encompassing the best of Wadi Rum's dreamlike landscapes, venturing far beyond the well-trodden 4x4 paths and into the heart of the Protected Area. As one of the trail's co-creators, Ben Hoffler, explained, it's a rich amalgam of Bedouin trails: "Among the pathways it links are walking tracks, shepherding tracks, camel tracks, hunting routes, smuggling routes [and] part of the old darb al-hajj (pilgrimage route) to Mecca."

Hoffler has spent more than a decade blazing mountain paths in the region, including Egypt's Sinai and Red Sea Mountain trails and the Bedouin Trail – a transcontinental 1,200km route linking Jordan to Upper Egypt. Still, for Hoffler, there's a distinct and enduring allure to Wadi Rum. "The mountains tower up and soar up in a way that has a grandeur that I haven't seen in other parts of the Hisma plateau. [Wadi Rum] also cradles a Bedouin culture that remains in many ways more traditional than what you'll find in the Saudi Arabian parts of the Hisma… It has a special feeling."

Like the ingenious Nabatean civilisation that built Petra many centuries before them, the Zalabieh (the most prominent Bedouin community within the Protected Area today) were drawn to Wadi Rum by the perennial springs that trickle at the base of Jebel Rum – the majestic massif that towers over the valley just opposite Jebel Umm Ishrin. Sprouting with wild mint thickets, the rock walls around the springs are adorned with ancient Thamudic and Greek inscriptions along with several distinctly Nabatean shrines.

Yet, until only a few generations ago, the Bedouin village located at the base of Jebel Rum was little more than a huddle of goat-hair tents. Thanks to government efforts since the 1930s, the majority of the Bedouin here (as elsewhere in Jordan) have now permanently settled, with SUVs effectively replacing camels and 4x4 tourism driving the local economy. Most such tours head south, following the valley along a virtual highway of tracks.

By contrast, the Wadi Rum Trail climbs east into the twisting bowels of the mountains, losing the crowds from the start. Ten days later, it ends where it began, with increasingly hair-raising abseils down the face of Jebel Rum landing you back at the springs.

Climber and adventurer Tony Howard was first drawn to Wadi Rum in the 1980s and has since played a pivotal role in putting Wadi Rum on the tourism map. In exploring and publishing the region's first climbing routes, he struck up lasting friendships with Zalabieh members and was deeply impressed by their hospitality and knowledge of the steep terrain.

After Howard and Hoffler hiked the Sinai Trail together in Egypt, the two began collaborating with Howard's friends in Wadi Rum – among them Zalabieh elders – to create a similar long-distance trail in Jordan.

Like Hoffler's other projects in Egypt, the Wadi Rum Trail was designed with both hikers and locals in mind. Though tackling the trail on your own is permitted, the creators are convinced that the most rewarding experience is to be had in the company of Bedouin guides.

"The Wadi Rum Trail first and foremost pays homage to the Bedouin of Wadi Rum," said Howard. "They know the area, its flora and fauna intimately from ancestral knowledge – and they are always good company and good fun!"

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"There are many hearts in this path," said one such Zalabieh elder, Sabbah Eid. "[It's a] beautiful experience with nature and the life of the Bedouin, far from communication and modern life… it gives a special spirit to the place – complete calm." As Eid explained, much of the impetus for the trail's creation was to support the Bedouin community, connecting "a new generation of young people to work on this path – instead of working with tours on cars".

Hoffler believes that Bedouin-led efforts like the Wadi Rum Trail can help preserve the Bedouin's natural environment and cultural heritage. "If history have shown us anything it's that the Bedouin known how to live sustainably in the wilderness," Hoffler said.

While hiking the complete trail takes 10 days, those short on time can tackle it in bite-sized chunks, as I opted to do, beginning with the first of the route's six sections: the traverse of Umm Ejil. This leads to the spectacular dunes of Wadi Umm Ishrin, where the surrounding cliffs hide a trove of petroglyphs and Nabatean and Thamudic inscriptions. Scrambling over another craggy rise, the sandy expanse of the Khor al-Ajram basin spread to the south. After threading the gorgeous Abu Khashaba Canyon, we scaled Jebel Birda (1,574m) and stood atop its enormous rock arch. The views from Birda's ridge encompass the greatest of Wadi Rum's sandstone massifs to the north, west and south.

From here the trail leads east, leaving behind the camps and the sands of Wadi Rum's classic landscape to enter the desolate Tablelands, among the route's loneliest sections. It then arches south along an ancient camel trail, passing old burial grounds, further time-worn inscriptions and a valley dotted with traces of long-forgotten caravans.

Jordan's highest peak is the route's next landmark, located just 1km from the Saudi border: Umm ad-Dami (1,854m). The clouds burst with colour as I scrambled the final stretch to its stony summit. Salman, my young Bedouin guide for this stretch, explained that the peak's name is linked to an old Bedouin code of justice and honour. Blood feuds, known as damm ("blood") have long been resolved by way of this unwritten law. In Bedouin strongholds like Wadi Rum, this code still applies to this day, with tribal sheikhs still tasked as traditional jurists alongside – or in lieu of – civil authorities.

Looking west from the summit to the burnt-orange bluffs, I wondered if the name could perhaps have come from their rusty tinge at this hour. A welcome breeze picked up as I admired the succession of ridges, towering over enormous waves of immaculate sand. Just then, I felt my phone buzz: a message in Arabic welcomed me to Saudi Arabia.

The trail doesn't actually enter Saudi Arabia, but curves north-west into the Hejaz Hills before approaching the final summit of the trail: Jebel Rum (1,734m). For at least a century, the Bedouin have scaled Jebel Rum's summits, where rabbits and goats still flit through its wooded gullies. For hikers completing the entire trail, it's a jaw-dropping finish, involving ropes, harnesses and multipitch rappelling down the mountain's western face.  

Upon leaving the village, I mentioned to a handful of guides my desire to return and complete the full circuit. In striking contrast to the fast-paced, formulaic 4x4 tours on offer in Wadi Rum, increasingly featuring stays in luxury space pods inspired by films like The Martian, the trail's slow, deliberate meander offers a deeper, more visceral experience here – and in far more sustainable fashion.

Tatiana Haddad, a cultural anthropologist at the American University of Beirut, told me she was hopeful that the trail's creation is "emblematic of a growing consideration towards the ecological fragility of Wadi Rum and the vitality of its protection". Contrary to common assumptions, she noted that "desert ecology is in fact quite fragile, and many Bedouins are already having to change their lifestyles to adapt to Wadi Rum's degradation".

But alongside preserving Wadi Rum's natural environment aside, safeguarding the rich cultural heritage of the Bedouin community is at the heart of this route.

"Bedouin culture stands at a crossroads," Hoffler said. "If [the ancestral knowledge of this land] is lost, it will be a cultural tragedy for all of humanity." To live on, he explained, "it needs to actually be used. It needs to be learned. It needs to be practiced. It needs to be passed on to the next generations."

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