Hiking to The Wave
A highly sought after hiking destination, The Wave in Vermillion Cliffs National Monument is exclusively accessible by permit. The only way to get a permit is through either the monthly online lottery or the daily in person lottery for the last few spots. I don’t remember exactly when I started entering the lottery, but it’s been a couple years, and I’m not actually sure how it happened that I won as the odds are not great, but in August my name was drawn for a permit on November 2.
Once you win the permit, getting to The Wave is not a sure thing. It’s an approximately 6-ish mile round trip hike over exposed rock with no marked trail for most of the way. The summer would be brutal, snowy/icy weather would be challenging, and it’s possible to get lost any time due to the lack of marked trail.
Then there’s the potential hurdle of the road to the trailhead. From highway 89, there’s about 9 miles on House Rock Valley Road, which is unpaved and is crossed by multiple washes. It is not passible when it’s wet and has the potential for some serious washouts in heavy rain. I was happy to see that on November 2, 2021, it was a beautiful day in the 60’s and the road was in excellent shape.
Starting out from Wire Pass trailhead, the trail follows a wash briefly.
The Wave trail then leaves the wash heading into the Coyote Buttes North permit area and follows a fairly obvious trail for about a half mile or so.
The the obvious trail ends and it’s rock the rest of the way. After crossing the rock staircase, the trail proceeds predominately south all the way to the Wave. The tricky thing the BLM ranger explained during the orientation, is that due to the rock composition of the area, GPS and compasses may not be 100% reliable and apps with trail maps could also lead off course, so the visual cues are important to follow.
One very cool thing about the hike to The Wave is that the landscape the whole way is fascinating, not just at the actual Wave. Buttes and swirly, layered rocks are everywhere, and the first part of the hike, I was stopping every couple minutes to take pictures.
After walking a couple miles over rock and over the border from Utah into Arizona, we got to a sandy, rocky hill and at the top of the hill is the entrance to the Wave.
Entering the wave, there’s a pool of water at the entrance and then it splits into a Y.
There were a fair number of people at the Wave when we got there, so we went past the pool and to the right and then walked through and out and along the side of the slope continuing south.
Not too long after that, we got to a spot that was kind of flat and so we sat and had a snack taking in the landscape.
After our break, we looped around north back towards the Wave. There is a rock arch high up, but we decided we didn’t need to go that high up. And that is how we found the Second Wave, which is less colorful, but more textural.
Between the Second Wave and The Wave, there were several seasonal pools, which was quite unexpected, and even more unexpected was the aquatic life we found in those pools.
And then there was the main part of the Wave right in front of us. Most people had left or moved on to other areas by then, so we pretty much had it to ourselves.
So we sat and took it all in for a bit.
The last stop before heading back to the trailhead was the Mini Wave.
And for timeline for the day, the sun was coming up around 8am when we left our hotel, we started hiking about 9am and got to The Wave a little after 10:30. We spent about 2 hours at the Wave and then it took about 2 hours to hike back to the trailhead.
