South-east of AlUla, the lava fields of Harrat Khaybar look like another planet: black basalt, white volcanoes and craters you can walk into. Here is what it takes to design trails there.
Hegra is one of the most sensitive places we have ever designed trails for. Here is how Wild Guanabana scouted routes among the Nabataean tombs, and why heritage, not the map, decided where people walk.
Green Flag Trails is a quality framework from the World Trails Network. It checks that a trail delivers what it promises: its difficulty, its safety, its care for the environment and the accuracy of how it is marketed.
Many trail plans start as lines on a screen. Ours start on foot. We scout everything on the ground with great trails in mind, and only then sit down to turn what we found into a network.
A trail is a story that shares the real history, culture and sense of a place. In AlUla those stories run from the kingdoms of Dadan and Lihyan to the Nabataeans of Hegra, the Hijaz Railway and the tribes who still walk the land.
Wild Guanabana works from A to Z: from designing the trail network to promoting it and managing visitors. As the exclusive Outdooractive reseller in the Middle East, we make sure finished trails are found, trusted and walked.
No two destinations should share the same map. We design trail cartography from the colours, textures and stories of each place, with one family of maps for visitors and another for the teams who build and manage the trails.
A trail network that lasts is not designed in a few weeks. Our studies take months of on-site field work and months of research behind desks: reading, interviewing, benchmarking and analysing.
Some of the best trails are not new at all. We search for ancient footpaths, caravan routes and village paths, and build our trail networks around them, so that visitors walk in the footsteps of the people who shaped the land.
