The cliffs Virgin
How a small desert town got on the map
Red Bull Rampage, and the ground it runs on.
For most of the mountain bike world, Virgin is not a place near Zion. It is the place where Rampage happens. More than two decades of it, on public land a few minutes from the highway, with a venue history that is really a story about who owns this desert and what they let people do on it.
By Scott Buehler, Southern Utah local
Updated September 2026
The short answer
Red Bull Rampage is an invitation only freeride mountain bike contest held on the desert cliffs of public land near Virgin, Utah, a few miles off State Route 9. There is no set course. Riders and their dig crews cut their own line down a face of raw sandstone and ride it once, and the specific venue has moved around this valley across twenty five years. It runs in the fall, most often over a couple of days in October, it is ticketed and broadcast worldwide, and the ground it uses is closed terrain outside the event rather than a trail anyone can go and ride. If what you actually want is a real day on a bike near here, that is the JEM and Hurricane Cliffs network across the highway, not the Rampage face.
Start here
There is no course. That is the whole idea.
Red Bull Rampage is an invitational freeride mountain bike contest held on the cliffs and ridges around Virgin, and the thing that makes it different from every other bike event is that nobody hands the riders a track. They are given a face of loose sandstone and a window of days, and they and their dig crews cut their own line down it with hand tools. Then they ride what they built, once, in front of a camera.
The first edition ran in 2001, on terrain a few miles outside this town, and it worked precisely because the ground here is unlike anywhere else people ride. The Colorado Plateau stacks its sandstone in layers of very different hardness, so the erosion leaves near vertical chutes, ridgelines a foot wide and spines that fall away on both sides. Riders did not invent those features. They found them here and worked out what could be done with them.
For most of the sport, the town name and the event name are the same word. Say Virgin to somebody who rides and you will not get a question about Zion National Park, which is twenty minutes further east and, by this measure, the second most famous thing within reach of the highway through town.
The ground itself
It has moved around this valley for 25 years.
People talk about Rampage as though it happens in one place. It does not, and the venue history is genuinely the most interesting thing about the event if you live here, because it is a story about who owns the desert.
The first four editions, from 2001 to 2004, were held on Bureau of Land Management ground just outside town. Those are the years with no jumps built out of timber, no landing ramps and no dig budgets to speak of, and a great many riders still consider them the purest version of the thing. From 2008 the event moved onto nearby Utah Trust Lands, state ground managed to generate revenue for schools, and that is where the venues of the last decade and a half have sat.
The venues rotate within that ground. The 2025 edition split across two of them, putting the men on the site used in 2016, 2017 and 2021 and the women on the one used in 2014 and 2015. That rotation is deliberate: a face that has been dug, ridden and reclaimed does not give a good contest twice in a row, and the ground needs years to recover.
The permit put the event back on the original BLM parcels near town, the same land the first contest ran on in 2001. That it can be sited there at all is only possible because the ground is still public.
A quarter of a century of the sport's most extreme event has happened inside twenty minutes of a town with no grocery store.
The paperwork behind it
A federal decision and a lease that was not sold.
Running an event of this size on federal land is a permitting exercise, not a handshake. Bringing Rampage back to the original ground meant a special recreation permit from the BLM's St. George Field Office, a public comment window and an environmental review. The authorization that came out of it is narrower than most people assume: it covers a limited number of events over the following ten years, and only if the ground is adequately reclaimed in between.
Two events, ten years, reclamation in between, on ground the public owns. The rotation between faces is not simply a creative choice; it is what the land and the paperwork both require.
The other half of the story ran the other direction. Not long before, the original site sat inside a proposed oil and gas lease sale. Riders and the wider public commented in volume against it, and the parcel did not go forward. The place where a whole discipline of the sport invented itself is public land, and it is still public land because a lot of people took the trouble to write in during a comment window. If you want one argument for why the federal land around this town matters to the people who live near it, that is the cleanest one available.
If you want to be there
Spectating is not a roadside affair.
Rampage is ticketed and it is not the sort of event you happen upon from the highway. Spectators are confined to designated viewing areas at the base of the course, and getting to them means a shuttle, a bike or your feet depending on which ticket you hold. At least one ticket type in recent years has meant riding or walking a dirt road several miles long with no motor vehicles allowed on it at all.
Tickets follow a familiar pattern. They go on sale weeks ahead, they are limited, and they do not sit around. If you are planning travel, work from the fall window, most often two days in October, and pin the exact dates down with the event once they are posted.
What it does to the town for that week is the part visitors never see. Every room between Hurricane and Springdale goes, the highway through the valley carries traffic it was not built for, and helicopters work the ridges. It is one week. Residents plan around it the way a ski town plans around a holiday weekend, and then it is October in a quiet valley again.
Confirm dates and tickets at the source. Event dates, ticket types and access arrangements change every year, and this page is a snapshot rather than a schedule. The event's own site is the only thing worth trusting the week you travel, and the BLM St. George Field Office is the authority on what is permitted on the ground itself.
The other 51 weeks
What you can and cannot go and ride.
This is the question I get asked most often about Virgin by people who ride, and the honest answer has two halves that people tend to collapse into one.
The original ground from the first four years is public land managed by the BLM, and riders do go and look at it, and some of them go and ride what is left of those lines. That is a legitimate use of public land and it is part of why the parcel mattered enough to defend. It is also, to be plain about it, terrain that has killed the confidence of very good riders and has no trail, no signage, no water and no phone signal, and what remains of a twenty year old line is not maintained by anybody.
The venues used from 2008 onward are a different matter. Those sit on Utah Trust Lands, which is state ground with its own access rules, and event infrastructure and closures apply around a contest. Turning up at the current site outside the event is not a public lands right, and treating it as one is how access gets lost for everybody. Check who manages the specific parcel before you ride it.
If what you actually want is a great day on a bike near Virgin, the answer is not the Rampage site anyway. The JEM Trail, Hurricane Rim and Gould's Rim run on BLM ground on the other side of the highway, they connect into a loop in the region of twenty two miles, and the lower JEM trailhead is minutes from town on Sheep Bridge Road. The Hurricane riding guide covers that network, and Gooseberry Mesa with it.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
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Read the pageQuick answers
Rampage, answered.
On the cliffs and ridges of public land near Virgin, Utah, in Washington County, a few miles off State Route 9. The venue is not one fixed spot. The first four editions ran on Bureau of Land Management ground, the event later moved to nearby Utah Trust Lands, and the exact face rotates from year to year so that dug ground gets time to recover.
In the fall, most often in October, over a couple of days. The exact dates shift every year, and recent editions have run the women's competition and the men's on separate days. Confirm the dates with the event before you book travel around it.
It depends which site you mean. The original ground is public land managed by the BLM, and riders do go and look at what remains of those lines, with no trail, no signage, no water and no phone signal to help them. The later venues sit on Utah Trust Lands under different access rules, with closures around the event. Find out who manages the specific parcel before you go, because getting that wrong is how access gets lost.
There is a managed spectator arrangement rather than open access to the venue, and it changes from year to year with the permitting. Check the event's current information rather than planning to walk up.
It fills. Lodging across the valley books out, State Route 9 carries far more traffic than usual, and the population of the area multiplies for a few days.
Yes. Every venue it has used sits on public ground, first BLM land and later Utah Trust Lands, and a federal permit is required to run it. When the original site was once caught up in a proposed oil and gas lease sale, public comment kept the parcel from being leased, which is why the place the sport was invented is still open land.
With a ticket, and on foot, a bike or a shuttle depending on which ticket you hold. Spectators stay within designated viewing areas at the base of the course rather than roaming the ridges, and one recent ticket type meant riding or hiking a dirt road several miles long with no motor vehicles allowed. If you would rather watch it warm, it has been carried on ESPN+ in the United States and Red Bull TV elsewhere.
A great deal of it, and none of it is on the Rampage cliffs. The JEM Trail, Hurricane Rim and Gould's Rim run on BLM ground between Virgin and Hurricane and link into a loop of roughly twenty two miles, with the lower JEM trailhead minutes from town on Sheep Bridge Road. JEM in particular is about seven miles of fast, smooth singletrack and one of the friendliest introductions to desert riding in Southern Utah.
No. The site sits on managed public land and the lines are built for the event rather than left as trails. The JEM and Hurricane Cliffs network is the riding that is genuinely open.
The cliffs are public, and so is the argument.
Living near land like this means the decisions about it are made in comment periods rather than in living rooms. If you are looking at property out here, understanding what surrounds it and who manages it is not a footnote to the purchase. It is most of the purchase.
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