Eight trail files, four workshops, one citizen-science programme.

Yes — most visiting families combine two day-trails with one overnight, typically the Whale Valley boardwalk, the Tunis pottery loop and the White Desert overnight. The cooperative can sequence the three over five days from Cairo and back. Write at the contact form and mark which trails you would like.

The Wadi El-Hitan boardwalk is wheelchair-accessible for the first 800 metres on a packed-sand surface. The Tunis riverbank slow walk is wheelchair-accessible for the full 4 km on a paved corniche path. The other six trails are not wheelchair-accessible; the terrain is desert sand, rock and uneven footing.

We host school groups twice a year, once in the autumn and once in the spring, through arrangement with the cooperating school's teacher coordinator. The schedule is fixed eight months in advance; school groups have priority on the Whale Valley citizen-science programme and on the Issawi family's spring agricultural walk. Write to the desk with school-group enquiries marked clearly.

For overnight trails (White Desert, Wadi Hitan + Rayan combined, Bahariya extension), the cooperative provides tents, sleeping mats, ground sheets, communal mess gear and cooking fire. Families bring their own sleeping bags rated to nine degrees Celsius, personal items, and any specific food preferences not on the standard menu. The kit list is in the kids' trail essentials file.

The cooperative routes the booking to another member family with the right terrain experience, with the visiting family's consent. If no member family is available — for instance, during the Eid al-Adha family week when all members are with their own families — the cooperative declines the booking rather than substitute an external guide.

No. The cooperative does not sell to or through commercial tour operators. We work only with families approaching the cooperative directly. We do welcome editorial enquiries from journalists and travel writers; the press protocol is described in the methodology document.

Yes — two. The original 2009 Lake Qarun northern shore trail was removed in 2014 because the development of the northern shore made the route no longer pleasant for walking; the file is archived but not republished. The 2012 Wadi Hitan eastern approach was removed in 2017 after the access road changed; the cooperative chose not to rebuild the route under the new road alignment.

The November and March printed updates go out by post to members in Egypt, by email PDF to international members, and are stocked at the cooperative office for visiting families on arrival. The update is also published openly on this site from the second week of December and the second week of April respectively. Members get it three to four weeks earlier.

Any member family may propose a new trail at either of the two annual board meetings. The proposal must include a draft route, an initial water-and-toilet plan, a draft age rating, and a proposed scout schedule. The board votes whether to accept the proposal into the scout pipeline; an accepted proposal moves through the four-step scouting process described on the home page. The process from proposal to publication typically takes between fourteen and twenty-four months. Five proposals are currently in the pipeline at various stages; we expect one to enter the catalogue in November 2026 and another in March 2027.

Several member families do other work as desert guides, agricultural workers or village teachers; the cooperative does not require exclusivity. What we do require is that any work that could be confused with a cooperative trail — for instance, a private desert guide engagement for a family that found the guide through the cooperative — is declared at the board's half-year meeting and documented. This avoids the appearance of competition between the cooperative catalogue and a guide's private practice.

One family has left the cooperative in eighteen years, in 2016, when the family relocated to Alexandria for a child's medical reasons. The trails that family led — at the time, two — were re-walked by two other member families before being reassigned. No trail was removed from the catalogue because of the departure; the cooperative's structure assumes redundant capability for every trail. If a future member family leaves, the same approach applies: the trails are re-walked and reassigned without loss to the catalogue.

Yes — write to the desk with the specific request, your experience and the ages and experience of the children in your party. The cooperative occasionally arranges a more demanding variant of a catalogue trail for families with prior desert experience; this is done case by case and is not part of the published catalogue. The family-rating considerations remain unchanged; we do not push a trail past its family-rated limits even on request.

Disputes among member families are rare and are handled at the board level. Two structural disputes have occurred in eighteen years — one over the allocation of citizen-science grant work in 2019 and one over the use of the cooperative office for a family event in 2023. Both were resolved at the board meeting following the dispute with no lasting damage to the cooperative; both are mentioned in the relevant year's transparency note in the December update.

The cooperative has a memorandum of understanding with the Wildlife Trust covering the Wadi El-Hitan citizen-science programme and the annual reporting. The Wildlife Trust does not have editorial control over the cooperative's trail files; the Trust's grant covers the citizen-science work specifically and is detailed in the December financial transparency note. Comparable structural separation applies to the Fayoum Heritage Foundation relationship.