The cliffs Virgin
How a town of 700 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. Twenty five years 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.
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.
For 2026, the twenty fifth year, the event is going back to the beginning. The dates are 8 October for the women and 10 October for the men, on the original BLM parcels where the first contest ran in 2001.
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. On 26 June 2026 the BLM's St. George Field Office opened a public comment period on a special recreation permit application to bring Rampage back to the original areas, taking comment through 12 July. On 21 July 2026 it issued an environmental assessment and a decision record authorising the 2026 event and one further event within the following ten years, conditional on the ground being adequately reclaimed in between.
That is a narrower authorisation than most people assume, and it is the reason the venue rotation is not simply a creative choice. Two events, ten years, reclamation in between, on ground the public owns.
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 for the 2026 anniversary edition were announced for release on 26 August, which is the usual pattern: they go up weeks ahead and they do not sit around. If you are planning travel, the two dates to work from are 8 October for the women's competition and 10 October for the men's.
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.
Keep reading
More of Virgin on The Local.
The road up
Kolob Terrace Road
Twenty five miles, 4,600 feet, no entrance station and a gate that shuts in November.
Read the guidePermits and trails
The Subway and Hop Valley
The lotteries, the wilderness permits, and the three trails that need neither.
Read the guideThe shelf
Virgin, from a local
The town itself: the river bottom, the road up, the Pocketville years and the mountain.
Read the pageQuick answers
Rampage, answered.
On the cliffs and ridges just outside Virgin, Utah, in Washington County, a few miles from State Route 9. The venue is not in one fixed spot: the first four editions from 2001 to 2004 ran on Bureau of Land Management ground, the event moved to nearby Utah Trust Lands from 2008, and the specific face rotates between editions so that dug ground gets years to recover.
The twenty fifth anniversary edition is scheduled for 8 October 2026 for the women's competition and 10 October 2026 for the men's, on the original Bureau of Land Management site where the first contest ran in 2001. Tickets were announced for release on 26 August 2026. Dates and access arrangements change year to year, so confirm with the event before booking travel around them.
It depends entirely on which site you mean. The original ground used from 2001 to 2004 is public land managed by the BLM, and riders do visit and ride what remains of those lines, with no trail, no signage, no water and no phone signal to help them. The venues used from 2008 onward sit on Utah Trust Lands under different access rules, with closures around the event. Establish who manages the specific parcel before you go, because getting that wrong is how access gets lost.
Yes. The St. George Field Office opened public comment on the special recreation permit application on 26 June 2026, took comment through 12 July, and issued an environmental assessment and decision record on 21 July 2026 authorising the 2026 event plus one additional event within the following ten years, conditional on the ground being adequately reclaimed in between.
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 required riding or hiking a dirt road several miles long with no motor vehicles permitted. 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 it is not 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 in the region of 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 is one of the friendliest introductions to desert riding in Southern Utah.
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.