Catching the desert's Wave

BIG WATER, Utah -- So there I was, jammed into a room in a one-story government building in Southern Utah with 30 other hikers.

The day before, I had flown to Flagstaff, Ariz., rented a car and driven more than two hours to Page, near the Utah border, then gotten up early for a 30-minute drive to Big Water. Inside the crowded room, a staffer with the Bureau of Land Management began to drop numbered bingo balls into a small cage.

The room fell quiet as he turned the crank. He let one ball pop out of a hinged opening and picked it up.

"Number one!" he shouted.

A young Seattle couple let out a breath and grinned. They -- and eight other hikers in quick succession -- had just won a permit to hike into this wilderness.

"That's it, folks," the bureau worker announced.

The lottery determined who got to see the Wave, one of the most-photographed rock formations in North America. Hikers and tourists from around the world are fixated on this slice of sandstone, an obsession fueled by the thousands of glossies that fill hundreds of guidebooks and online galleries.

To keep the Wave from being damaged or overrun, the bureau allows no more than 20 visitors a day (10 from the on-site lottery, 10 from an online lottery), and during the peak spring and fall seasons, the odds of winning that treasured permit can be as low as 1 in 10.

I was drawn here by cynicism. I expected an up-close tour of the Wave to fall way short of the hype. I secured my permit months in advance by playing the bureau lottery online, a decent alternative to the drop of the bingo ball. I submitted my application and a $5 fee by e-mail in July and learned a few days later that I had won one of 10 online permits for Sept. 12. I was ready to be underwhelmed.

I knew I had to hurry. I didn't want to get caught plodding through the desert in the midday heat. The temperatures in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness can shoot from hot to infernal in a few hours. Even lizards look for cover around noon.

Though I had a well-marked map with color photos to guide me, I didn't want to take a chance on getting lost. So I hired a guide.

In a tie-dyed shirt, blond ponytail, blue jeans and work boots, Steve Dodson, 51, looked more like a Woodstock roadie than an outdoor guide. We drove down a washboard road, gravel and dirt spewing in our wake. He braked at the Wire Pass trail head, a gravel parking lot eight miles south of U.S. Highway 89.

From here, we began a three-mile trek across a rust-colored, nearly shadeless desert. The bureau suggests that hikers carry at least a gallon of water for the trek; I brought a little more than that and wished I had more. We started at 10 a.m., and I could feel my shirt melting on my back.

Our hike followed a dry wash for a half-mile before it cut through red sand dunes. Dodson assured me that the photos don't do The Wave justice. As a professional guide, he supports the permit limits even though they tend to stifle his business.

"The wildlife experience is greatly enhanced with seclusion," he said.

Geology's kitchen

Geologists use words like "diagenetic coloration" and "stratigraphic relationships" to explain its colors and stripes. They might dumb it down and tell you that the Wave is made of Jurassic-age Navajo sandstone -- 190-million-year-old sand dunes turned to rock. Stacked one atop another, the dunes calcified in vertical and horizontal layers.

Iron oxides bled through to give the sandstone a salmon color. Hematite and goethite added yellows, oranges, browns and purples. It was all underground until water seeped through a huge vertical crack in a ridge above. The water cut a channel that was scoured over thousands of years by wind-blown sand carving smooth curves and swells that look like cresting ocean waves.