I hear voices. Or perhaps it’s the wind singing through the dry canyon. We push and pedal the last hundred vertical feet toward a notch in a spiny ridge. Goat prints and rock cairns mark the way. The view makes me giggle.

Old trails in old lands have that effect on me. A playground of rock rolls and sandstone slabs funnel into a strip of trail as white as gypsum that cuts across a bench of rare flat ground.

“Yalla! (Let’s go!)” our guide, Sari Husseini, calls out in Arabic, uttering the second most important expression among the dozen or so mountain bikers in Jordan.

The first is “Inshallah (God willing).” If you wish for something to happen, then go straight to the top and invoke God. Even a non-believer like me believes that prayers are sometimes answered with a gift—and this trip is a gift that keeps on giving.

We’re in southwestern Jordan, in the remote valley of Abu Qusaib, and though there are ancient trails here it seems unlikely that they’ve been ridden by bikes. Even the Bedouin shepherd we’d met earlier at the trailhead pointed to our bikes and said he’d never seen “those things” around here.

“Yalla, yalla!” I reply to Sari, clipping into my pedals and launching down the gritty sandstone. Seconds later, sharp white gravel crunches under my tires, giving a moment of respite before the trail curves onto an arm-length-wide ledge. On one side, a slot canyon disappears into darkness. On the other, tangerine-pink rock rises upward, sculpted by wind and water into a fa ade of gargoyles and ghouls.