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The farther Dodson led me toward the Wave, the more the landscape changed. We marched through dry, flaking badlands, freckled with shrubs and an occasional juniper tree. We scrambled over red slickrock, scouting out our first landmark, a set of buttes. We rested in the shade, watching a peregrine falcon hunt on the side of a red-and-beige mountain etched with ridges that look like stretched muscles.

After a few minutes, we headed south, looking to a tall, gray ridge on the horizon for a huge vertical crack that marked the entrance to the Wave.

We entered this weird, dreamlike world of swirling colors and psychedelic patterns. Maybe it was the desert heat, but it all looked like gooey cinnamon taffy, stretched over huge mounds and 50-foot canyon walls. The surrounding buttes were heaps of melting rocky road ice cream.

The Wave has swooning, undulating walls lined with burnt sienna, pink, gray, turquoise and pale green. The bands mostly run horizontally, but at spots they zigzag and shimmy before falling back into their previous pattern. It was nearly noon and the temperature was pushing 100 degrees.

A lasting look

Nearly all the other permit winners for that day milled around the multicolored canyon. A group of German tourists sat on a sandstone shelf, eating apples and taking photos.

Susie Shults from St. George, Utah, brought her boyfriend to see the stony wonderland. It took her three tries at the lottery to win a permit. When she first walked into the Wave, Shults said she imagined herself flying, swooping down along the rocky surface, soaking up the colored bands and banking off the undulating canyon walls.

By 2 p.m., the other hikers had vanished into the desert. Dodson and I stayed to see how the afternoon light played on the colored rock. It took nature 190 million years to create this place. I took my time enjoying it.

I snapped almost 100 digital photos, but I knew the images couldn't convey the experience.

I sat in the base of a sunburned sandstone wave, resting my back on the cresting wall, naming the images in the rocks, like watching clouds take shape in the sky.

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