The Wadi Rum Trail is a new 120km hiking circuit in the deep, southerly deserts of Jordan. It is the first project of its kind to centre squarely on the iconic deserts of Wadi Rum and the only one of the Middle East’s long-distance hiking trails to integrate rock climbing into its main route. It takes hikers on a journey through the magnificent sandstone heartlands of Wadi Rum along with lesser-known, little-trodden tracts of wilderness in its hinterlands, scaling five mountains on the way, including Jebel Um Adami; Jordan’s highest summit at 1854m. A sister project of the Sinai Trail and Red Sea Mountain Trail in Egypt, the Wadi Rum Trail was created over a period of three years, with a similar vision, way of working and set of goals guiding its development from the beginning. Bedouin tribesmen from Wadi Rum oversaw the scouting of the route and took a leading role in shaping the project into what it is today and it stands now a community tourism initiative, harnessed to the Bedouin community of the region. Five different Bedouin tribes live together in Wadi Rum including branches of the Tarabin, who live around the first parts of the Sinai Trail at Ras Shetan. Bedouin guides from any one of these five tribes in Wadi Rum have the same right to work on the trail as all the others. The Wadi Rum Trail seeks to show the best of its homeland’s landscapes, history and heritage to the world, raising the profile of slow, sustainable forms of travel in the area and encouraging them as a viable alternative to the 4×4 tours and often heavily stylised Bedouin cultural experiences that dominate its tourism today. It also seeks to raise a wider global awareness around the region’s unique heritage of climbing, underlining the extraordinary climbs made by peoples of the region whose names have been long forgotten.