Why the Dana-to-Petra route
Most people arrive in Petra through the front door: the Siq, the Treasury, the five-star reveal of a rose-red facade at the end of a slot canyon. It’s remarkable. I’ve done it three times and it never gets old.
But there is another way to arrive. The Dana-to-Petra trek — four days, roughly 75 kilometers, through terrain that transitions from Mediterranean forest to desert canyon to the ancient back roads of the Nabataean Kingdom — deposits you into Petra through the back door. Through Little Petra (Beidha) and the Sabra area. Through a landscape that the tour buses never see.
We did the trek in October 2019, guided by a local operator who runs the route several times a season with groups of four to eight people. Here is what those four days looked like.
Day one: Dana village to Feynan (22 km, 900m descent)
We left Dana village at 7am, which meant sleeping in Dana the night before at the RSCN’s Rummana camp — tents on a promontory above the valley with views that made the uncomfortable cots irrelevant. Dana village itself is a small Ottoman-era stone village perched at the edge of the canyon, largely abandoned in the 1980s and restored over the past two decades as an ecotourism destination. It’s lovely in a slightly melancholy way, all empty houses and herb gardens.
The first day descends from Dana village at 1,500 meters to the Feynan ecolodge at roughly 100 meters, through a series of canyon systems that compress geological time into a morning’s walk. At the top: juniper and pine, wildflowers even in October, cold air. By mid-morning: narrow sandstone gorges, the first palm trees, heat building. By afternoon: the flat semi-desert of Wadi Araba, the Jordan Rift Valley stretching north and south, the distant shimmer of what might be the Dead Sea.
The descent is long. My knees felt it by hour three. The trail is marked in sections but requires a guide in others — the route crosses private land and wadis that change after rain. In October, dry season, no rain problems.
Feynan ecolodge runs entirely on solar power in one of the world’s most remote hotel locations. The dinner that evening — vegetarian, elaborate, served by candlelight because there’s no outdoor illumination — was one of the best I ate in Jordan.
Blisters acquired day one: two (heels, predictably).
Day two: Feynan to Shobak area (18 km, 900m ascent)
If day one was all descent, day two was all ascent. We climbed back up out of the rift valley through a different set of canyons, past Nabataean copper mines that look like nothing from the outside but contain, according to our guide Ahmad, chambers that were worked continuously from Bronze Age to Byzantine period. He pulled fragments of slag from a scree slope with the casual certainty of someone who’d found them a hundred times.
The ascent to the plateau took most of the morning. By noon we were in a different climate: cooler, drier, with the high plateau landscape of southern Jordan stretching to Shobak Castle, the Crusader fortress that was one of the forward positions of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century. We walked past its walls without going in — there would be time for castles later — and continued to a small guesthouse in a nearby village for the night.
The guesthouse was basic: shared rooms, a single cold shower (cold is relative at 35°C altitude), dinner of rice, chicken, bread, and the inevitable tea. Fine. Perfect, actually, given that the trail is doing the heavy lifting.
Blisters day two: the same two, now taped. A new one forming on the right ball of the foot.
Day three: Shobak area to Little Petra environs (20 km)
This was the hardest day, not because of elevation — the terrain was flatter — but because of heat and the psychological accumulation of three days of walking. We left at 5:30am to cover maximum distance in the cooler morning hours, and by 10am we had done 12 kilometers in conditions that felt genuinely excellent: low light, no tourists (we passed one other hiker all day), the gradual shift in landscape from brown plateau to the reddish sandstone country that signals Petra’s approach.
Our guide knew the geography of Nabataean trade. Every feature of the landscape came with a history: this pass controlled the route from Arabia Felix; that cistern fed a caravanserai; these carvings — deities, water-spirits, worn almost to abstraction by millennia of wind — marked the edge of someone’s territory. Walking the route makes Petra’s scale comprehensible in a way that visiting the site alone doesn’t. The Nabataean kingdom was not just a city; it was a trade network embedded in the landscape.
By mid-afternoon we reached the camp near Little Petra — a cluster of tents in a canyon that the tour groups don’t reach, about 4 kilometers north of Beidha. We had the canyon to ourselves. We lay on sleeping mats and watched the light move across the sandstone walls and didn’t say much.
Blisters day three: the original two, now philosophical. The ball blister, now the main character.
Day four: arrival at Petra (15 km)
The final morning was not an early start. We walked at a reasonable pace through the Beidha area — Little Petra, technically, which is a miniature version of Petra with carved rock tombs and a triclinium and far fewer visitors — and then continued through the Petra back roads.
The back entrance to Petra deposits you near the Monastery. You have climbed up from the south rather than walked in from the north, and the effect is exactly opposite to the Treasury reveal: instead of the famous front facade, you arrive at the top of the site and look down across the entire Nabataean city spread below you. The colonnaded street, the Royal Tombs, the distant entrance canyon.
We stood there for a few minutes. The other trekkers were doing that quiet thing people do when they’re processing something.
“Better than the front door?” someone asked.
“Different,” said Ahmad. “Front door is faster. Back door, you understand it.”
He was right. After four days of walking through the landscape that the Nabataeans also walked — the same canyons, the same water cisterns, the same views — the site made sense in a way it hadn’t on my first two visits. You understand the logic of it: why here, why this canyon, why this level of architectural ambition. Because this was the center of a trading empire that connected Arabia, the Mediterranean, and India, and it was built by people who controlled water in a desert and turned that control into extraordinary wealth.
Amman: Dana to Petra 4-day trekking adventurePractical notes
Operator: We used a local licensed operator out of Amman. Cost in 2019 was approximately 280 JOD per person all-inclusive (guide, accommodation, all meals, park fees). Group size was six people. Look for operators affiliated with the Jordan Tourism Board or the RSCN.
Fitness requirement: The route is grade moderate-difficult. You should be comfortable with 15-20 km walking days and significant elevation change. No technical climbing. Poles are useful for the descents.
Footwear: Proper hiking boots with ankle support. Trail runners are acceptable if you know your feet; sandals are not. The terrain varies from rocky scree to loose sand to flat track.
Water: Carry 3 liters minimum at all times. Feynan has clean water; other refill points depend on season and guide knowledge.
Best season: October-November and March-May. April brings wildflowers in the high sections. Avoid midsummer — the descent to Feynan in 45°C heat is genuinely dangerous.
The complete trail guide — including current trail conditions, navigation notes, and water source updates — lives at /guides/dana-to-petra-trek/.
There are also guided tour options that handle all logistics, which we’ve linked below — useful if you prefer not to navigate the operator selection process yourself.
Jordan Trail: Dana to Petra 4-day trekking tourThe back door to Petra is worth every blister.