Colored Canyon

A narrow slot canyon in the Sinai interior, about an hour inland from Nuweiba. The walk runs roughly eight hundred metres between sandstone walls up to forty metres high, in places narrow enough to touch both sides at once.

The colours are the point: bands of rust red, ochre, purple, cream and near-black running horizontally through the rock and twisting where the strata fold. Because the walls are so close, the light bounces between them and the whole passage glows.

The walk

• Around 60–90 minutes through the canyon itself, mostly flat sand and gravel
• A few short scrambles over rock steps — nothing technical, but hands are needed
• Best in the middle of the day, when the sun reaches down into the slot and lights the colours
• Usually combined with a Bedouin lunch and a stop at Ain Khudra oasis

Safety

Never enter if rain is forecast anywhere in the surrounding hills. Slot canyons flood catastrophically and with almost no warning — water falling kilometres away funnels into the narrows. Local guides watch the weather for exactly this reason.

The rock is Nubian sandstone, laid down as sediment when this region lay under shallow seas and river systems. The colours are iron and manganese: iron oxides give the reds, yellows and browns, and manganese produces the purples and blacks. The bands record changing chemistry in the water as the sediments were deposited, and the swirls and folds record what happened to the beds afterwards.

Cut by water that is almost never there

The canyon was carved by flash floods. Sinai gets very little rain, but what it gets tends to arrive all at once, and water racing off bare rock has nowhere to soak away. Those floods, over hundreds of thousands of years, sawed this slot into the plateau — a landscape made almost entirely by an event that happens perhaps a few times a decade.

The smooth, scoured surfaces at the base of the walls and the gravel underfoot are the marks of the last one.

The Bedouin route

This is not undiscovered country. The canyons and wadis of eastern Sinai have been travelled for centuries by the Tarabin and other Bedouin, who used them as shaded routes between grazing and water. The guides who take visitors through are generally from those communities, and the trip is one of the few forms of tourism in the region where the income stays local.