The Wave in Northern Arizona is one of those “must see” locations for a photographer. It’s a little involved to go there but it’s worth the effort.
The Wave
The wave is a unique sandstone formation in the Coyote Buttes North Wilderness just south of the Utah-Arizona border. The colors and patterns of the rock are unlike anything you’ll likely find elsewhere. It’s on many a photographers bucket list. Although the erosion process originally started with water runoff, it is now almost exclusively formed by wind erosion. The sandstone ridges and troughs are fragile and the area is protected from too much visitor pressure by a permit system.
Coyote Buttes North and the Wave are administered by the BLM at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument visitors center in Kanab, UT. The wave is hard to get to for two reasons. First, it’s a tough hike. Especially with a heavy camera backpack and adequate water. Second, you must have a permit to hike in there and they aren’t easy to get. There are hefty fines for hiking to the wave without one and they do have personnel that are out there to check. The demand for these permits is very high so the BLM has created a lottery system to only allow twenty people per day to make the hike. Ten of those are from an online lottery four months prior to your hike. These permits go instantly so your chances of getting one of these is slim. The other ten are reserved for walk in permits and are issued the day before the hike and also in a lottery process. That’s what we did.
Permits
The walk-in lottery process was interesting. You show up at the BLM visitor center the morning before you want to hike. Promptly at 8:30am you’re ushered into a large conference room where you fill out a form indicating how many people will be in your hiking party along with some other information. You and 50+ other groups get to do this in the 30 minutes leading up to the 9:00am lottery. Each group can have a maximum of six people. The groups are numbered and that final number of wooden bingo balls is then put into a tumbler for the lottery. When a number is called, the group size is checked and then that many permits comes off the ten for the next day. If the group size was six, only four permits are left. The first day I went in without Karen. I didn’t win. But I did notice that most of the numbers called where clustered in the middle of the 50 or so balls in the tumbler. Maybe coincidence, maybe not. The second day, Karen and I both went in and I intentionally waited to hand my application in until we were in the 20’s rather than being in the single digits. Well, we won! Some people had been trying to get permits for 6 days in a row and another couple had been trying on and off for five years. We got it on the second try. I think Karen was our good luck charm.
The Hike
As I mentioned earlier, it’s a tough hike. It’s 6-7 miles but it’s anything but flat. Much of it is over slickrock and the trail is not well marked. Some of it is through deep sand, uphill. If you’ve ever hiked up a large sand dune you know it’s not easy. The BLM does give you a page of landmarks and some general instructions on how to get there but once on the trail you need to find your own way. Fortunately many GPS maps have the trail marked and I had a copy of one so we were able to follow that. They also stress that you need to bring plenty of water. Up to one gallon per hiker. We brought three liters each and we needed all of that. Gatorade would have been better.
It was a pretty cool experience and the difficulty getting permits combined with the strenuous hike made it one to remember.
The Image
Due to its orientation you have to wait until late morning for the shadows to go away. Shooting with shadow lines across the wave doesn’t produce very good results. The late morning light is a little harsher than I’d like but even with this harsher light it still makes for an arresting photograph. You don’t see landscapes like this everyday. There are a number of other formations around that can be photographed before the light gets right on the wave so if you hike fast and get to the wave early you can shoot those prior. The featured image above didn’t need much manipulation in post processing. Just watch your exposure histogram, especially the red channel, to make sure you don’t over expose. There’s a lot of red in the RGB histogram from all that sandstone. To give you some idea of what the larger area around the wave looks like, I added a wider shot below. It’s a pretty surreal environment.
Final Thoughts
The wave is one of those iconic locations that every photographer ought to do once. Not sure I’d do it again any time soon unless I knew the conditions were going to be different. There are times when there is water at the bottom of the wave and the reflections from the water can add quite a lot to the image. You pretty much have to be a local to time that one though. We probably will come back to explore the Grand Staircase-Escalante area a little deeper however. There are lots of interesting sandstone formations throughout this area and in the right light these can just glow with warm reflected light. And that’s what brings a photographer back for more.
Nikon D810 with Nikkor 24-70mm @24mm. f/8 at 1/320 sec. ISO 64
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