Jordan’s recent push to market outdoor adventures in its deserts and wadis relies on a pastoral trope of authenticity more than 2,000 years old. However, it also participates in a contemporary dynamic that repackages the wilderness as the site of highest value in nature, and then admits only a select few to its carefully choreographed authentic pleasures. These journeys into Jordan’s wadis and deserts suggest the prospect of journeys both exotic and ecologically sound. As such, they enable those who depend on the tourist trade to counter what has been a dismal run of years in the number of foreign visitors to the kingdom. In the words of one participant of the AdventureNEXT convention, held last spring at the Dead Sea: this new/old marketing language permits Jordan to change the narrative. It is no longer a dangerous Middle Eastern destination, but rather an exotic adventure destination (Jordan Times, May 19, 2017). Pastoral has long held out the dream of escaping the regimentation and surveillance of the court, or the city. The promise of a life of authenticity, lived close to the land, offers an implied, ironic, critique of the very conditions that produce both the pastoral and its audience. It is no surprise, then, that the global reach of capital makes this wilderness pastoral initiative possible in Jordan— with its trained guides, hospitality support, structure of insurance, and worldwide marketing. As described, these packages depend on posting the right people in the right spaces, and excluding those who do not belong to the carefully constructed narrative of authentic encounter with indigenous nature and culture. Who belongs in Jordan’s wild spaces? Tourists, of course. And their local Bedouin guides, despite their Jeeps and ATVs. The ability to purchase authentic contact is capital’s message. This message is a marked contrast to the small space of subversion the pastoral still allows to those who for financial or political reasons cannot leave Jordan, and who, like maroons and other adventurers of old, resort to internal wild spaces in the hope of respite from centers of power.