Wadi Qelt is a desert gorge where the footpath is an aqueduct: a stone channel first cut more than 2,000 years ago and still carrying spring water along the cliff wall. The wadi drops some 850 metres over roughly 25 kilometres, from the hills near Jerusalem down to Jericho. Three springs keep it alive — Ein Fara, Ein Fawwar and Ein Qelt — and Hasmonean and Herodian engineers piped their water to the royal winter palaces that stood where the valley opens onto the plain. The old Jerusalem-Jericho road, the road of the Good Samaritan, ran along the ridge just above. Halfway down, the Monastery of Saint George of Choziba is built into the rock face itself: blue domes, whitewashed cells and cypresses stacked on ledges above the drop. Hermits took to these cliffs in the 420s, and the monastery grew around them by about AD 500.
The path narrows to the channel itself — cliff on one shoulder, a straight fall on the other, water running clear and shallow at your feet. The rock above is pocked with the cells of hermits who came here for silence, and silence is still most of what the canyon holds. In 614 Persian troops killed the monks of Choziba, and their bones are kept in a chapel by the gate; the place lay ruined for centuries until Greek Orthodox monks rebuilt it, finishing in 1901. A few monks live there now and open the gate each morning. Below the walls the streambed is dry stone most of the year. Tradition holds this to be the brook Cherith of the Elijah story. The gorge sits in the occupied West Bank, reached from Jericho; the eastern stretch of the trail is not reliably safe to walk alone, so ask locally first.