00:00Everyone knows the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But hidden on the side of Oman's tallest mountain
00:05is a gorge just as deep, with a demon in its name and a lost village clinging to its cliff.
00:10And what people did to survive up there is almost impossible to believe.
00:14The Mountain of the Sun While the name Grand Canyon is already taken
00:19by its more Hollywood-coded counterpart out west, Oman's version answers to a different name.
00:24The mountain it is carved into is called Jebel Shams, which means the Mountain of the Sun,
00:27and at about 3,000 meters it is the highest peak in Oman. The canyon itself sits on the mountain's
00:33southern side, in the Ad-Dakalia Governorate, just northwest of a town called Al-Hamra.
00:37Getting there takes about three hours from the capital, Muscat, along a road that runs through
00:42the old city of Nizwa, carries on to Al-Hamra, and then climbs up into the Hajar Mountains.
00:47The gorge runs for about 12 kilometers, and in some places, the walls cut through more than
00:521,500 meters of rock, and the cliffs stand close to vertical. From the rim, there are a few ledges
00:57below, which means if you fall, you better have a parachute. The walls of the mountain
01:03were framed by a stack of limestone called the Hajar Supergroup, laid down between the
01:07late Permian and the late Cretaceous. Back then, this land sat under a sea called the Neotethes.
01:12Layer after layer of shells, coral and sediment, settled on the seafloor and turned to stone.
01:16That went on for tens of millions of years. Then the land began to move. Around the late
01:21Eocene, about 40 to 30 million years ago, the Arabian Plate pushed against the Eurasian Plate.
01:26That push lifted the whole region into a dome called Jebel Akhtar. Studies of the rock show
01:30that 4 to 6 kilometers of material was raised and stripped away around that time. The seafloor of the
01:36past became a mountain. And while Oman is relatively dry now, the occasional rain still comes, and when
01:42it comes hard, things can really get dramatic over here. Over time, these flash floods cut down through
01:47the limestone and carved the wadi deeper and deeper. Then the harder beds of stone held their shape and
01:52formed the cliffs leaving the softer layers to wear back and form ledges. Some of the deepening may
01:56also come from caves collapsing underground, since water eats away at limestone over time.
02:01The result is a slice of the earth you can read like the pages of a book. Geologists rank it
02:05as one
02:06of the best geological sites in the Middle East, because one wall shows the whole story of the
02:10Arabian platform. Near the canyon stands separate blocks of limestone called the Oman exotics, like Jebel
02:16Miss and Jebel Cower. These are read as pieces of old ocean islands that were pushed into place long
02:21ago. For visitors, the first stop is usually the Wadi Gull viewpoint along the Jebel Shams Road.
02:26From there, you look straight into the gorge. Some edges have no barrier, only stepped rock.
02:30The best months to come are October to April, when the air is cooler. Even in summer, the rim stays
02:35cooler than the lowlands, but the sun is strong and shade is rare. The canyon holds less total volume
02:40than Arizona's. Still, many who stand at the rim say the drop feels sharper here, because the walls
02:45fall away with almost nothing in between. That is the shape of the land. But this canyon is not
02:49only rock and air. People once lived inside it, on a shelf of stone with a drop on one side.
02:55The Village That Clung to the Cliff
02:57Halfway along the rim, a narrow ledge peels away from the main wall and threads across the face of
03:02the canyon. This is the path known today as the Balcony Walk, or Trail W6. It is an out-and
03:07-back
03:07route of roughly eight kilometers, three to five hours of walking, and it hugs the cliff the whole way.
03:12Painted stripes in red, white, and yellow mark the stones. On one side rises the mountain,
03:17on the other the ground simply ends, and the air falls away for hundreds of dizzying meters.
03:21Wild goats pick their way across the rock, like it is nothing. Follow that ledge to its end,
03:26and you arrive at something that should not be possible. Clinging to a shelf of rock,
03:30with a sheer drop of several hundred meters below it, sits the abandoned village of Sab Bonikamis,
03:35also called as Sab. Houses of stone and mud press into shallow caves and overhangs.
03:39Terraces stepped down toward the emptiness. For centuries, this impossible perch was somebody's
03:44home. Around fifteen families lived here. The village took its name from the Bonikamis,
03:48a branch of the Al-Kawater tribe. They chose the ledge on purpose. The only way in was that thin
03:53path, so raiders and enemies rarely reached them, and a spring higher up the mountain gave them water.
03:58From that single advantage, they built an entire world. And what a world it was! On terraces balanced over
04:04the drop, some hanging out clean over the edge, they grew wheat, corn, onions, garlic, pomegranates,
04:09figs, lemons and basil. They lifted water with a traditional device called a manger and sent it
04:13through a phallage, a hand-built channel that carried the flow to collection pools and down
04:17to the crops. They stored grain in sealed rooms called bacacure, packed with clay so the harvest
04:21kept for years. Three watchtowers stood guard, used both to spot danger and to scare birds off the
04:27ripening wheat. Life on the ledge asked a hard price. A feature in the Financial Times recorded a woman who
04:32lost her balance while harvesting corn on a terrace hung over the void and fell, still holding the
04:37crop. Stories like that show how thin the line was between a harvest and a fall. And yet families held
04:42on here for a very long time. Local accounts suggest the village stood for around 400 years.
04:47Then the modern world reached the mountain. From the 1960s, people began to leave, pulled down to the
04:52valley by the promise of roads, schools and services under Sultan Kabus. One local record says the last
04:57family left in 1986. By around the year 2000, the spring that fed the gardens had dried up,
05:03and the terraces withered for good. The people who traced their roots to this place now live down
05:07in Wadi Gull and Al Hamra. What remains is a kind of open-air museum. Collapsed houses, a few surviving
05:13pomegranate trees, the bones of the phallage, old millstones and the towers all sit right where they
05:17were left. Walk among them and the silence feels heavy, because you are standing inside a life that took
05:22incredible skill and nerve to build. And just past the ruins, tucked into the rock, the canyon keeps one
05:27more secret. The same secret that kept this village alive.
05:31Demon's Drops and a New Frontier
05:33Beyond the terraces, a faint trail marked by small stacked stones climbs up and away from the village.
05:38Many hikers miss it. Those who find it reach a hidden pool set under a rocky overhang,
05:42fed by water that seeps down from higher on the mountain. After rain it fills, and a small waterfall
05:46spills over the lip. This quiet shaded pool is the same water source that once let the cliff village
05:51survive, and today it rewards tired walkers with a place to rest, and when the water is clean, to swim.
05:56But the pool is the gentle side of this canyon. The gorge also hides some of the most extreme
06:01adventure in the whole Arabian Peninsula. Deep inside Wadi al-Nakar, climbers have opened a full
06:05descent with drop after drop, adding up to around 900 meters of rope work over several kilometers.
06:11The wildest single move is a free-hanging drop of about 385 meters under a feature called the Great
06:16Arch, close to the old village. A local pioneer nicknamed it the Sheik of the Crazies. The route was later
06:21filmed for a BBC series with Steve Backshall. For people who want a taste without the full descent,
06:27a via ferrata, a climbing path fitted with steel cables and rungs, lets them scale the cliffs with
06:32safety gear. The canyon is alive, too. Egyptian vultures ride the warm air rising off the rock,
06:38and Oman holds one of the most important populations of them in the world. Benelli's eagles hunt the same
06:43skies, and on the slopes below, the long-haired mountain goats do something that stops visitors in
06:47their tracks. They climb straight up into the trees and balance on the branches to reach the leaves.
06:52Then there is the name and the shadow it casts. Gull comes from the Arabic word for ghoul,
06:57a shape-shifting desert demon from old Arabian folklore. In the old stories, the ghoul lured
07:01travelers off the path in lonely places, in ruins and empty valleys and then killed and ate them.
07:06Travel writers often translate Wadi Gull as the valley of the demon. The mountain carries its own legend as
07:11well. One local tale tells of a woman who was turned to stone as punishment for treating bread
07:15without respect. The rock split from the mountain, and she was fixed forever in the stone,
07:19an eerie name for an eerie, empty gorge. Today, that quiet is starting to change.
07:24Under the national plan called Oman Vision 2040, the region is being shaped for mountain and ecotourism.
07:29In the wilgad of Al Hamra, work is already underway on a Grand Canyon recreation project worth around
07:3511 million Omani rials, with plans that include possible glass walkways and zip lines.
07:40Up on the plateau, new stays like the Grand Canyon domes offer luxury and views right over the gorge,
07:46and more tourism investment is being opened up across the area.
07:50So forget Arizona. Oman's Grand Canyon gives you a sheer drop of a thousand meters,
07:54a lost village that clung to the cliff for 400 years, a demon buried in its very name,
07:58and skies full of vultures and tree-climbing goats. It is a textbook of the earth,
08:02a museum of mountain life, and one of the last wild frontiers of the Arabian Peninsula,
08:07all in one gorge on the mountain of the sun. That brings us to the end of this video.
08:11For more interesting videos like this, click on the cards on your screen.
