[Detour] The Wave | We won the permit lottery. Now what?

Summary

A short written summary of the episode — not the full transcript. Press play above for the whole thing.

“Wake up. It’s four in the morning.”

“Why?”

“Because Jaren said we have to go early.”

Big got in the truck without knowing who Jaren was. Erika’s line for that is: throw your hat over the wall. Commit before you know how you will get there. Once the hat is over, you have to climb.

The Wave is on BLM land inside Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, 0.28 miles south of the Arizona line. You park in Utah, at Wire Pass, walk into Arizona, and the permit comes from a different BLM field office than the one managing the parking lot. Sixty-four people get in per day. We met a woman who has been entering for eight years. We got in on our second try.

Then the walk: 6.4 miles round trip, no shade, no trail, and sand that Big said was like trying to climb an avalanche. Jaren, our guide, took his shoes off at the trailhead. He says he is less clumsy barefoot, more careful where he puts a foot. Cy took his off too, and noticed the thing you would otherwise walk over: the surface sand was burning, and two inches under it the sand was cool. That gap is how the lizards get through an afternoon out here.

Jaren did not let Big ride along. He handed over the printed sheet of landmark photos and asked him to find two buttes shaped like teepees. Past the trailhead there is almost no signage, on purpose. Big never lost the route. “It was easy,” he said. It was not easy.

You come around an ordinary sandstone wall and the rock starts moving. Alana Archbold, who studies dune fields, explained the stripes: each is the face of a dune, and the sand avalanched down it in seconds, then waited for the next tipping point. The red is iron that groundwater carried in. Big picked up a Moqui marble and was told, hold it, don’t pocket it. He put it back.

The BLM’s own Vermilion Cliffs Junior Ranger book prints the Southern Paiute name for these cliffs: Angkar Mukwanikant, red cliffs. It says, in the present tense, that the storied rocks here, Tumpituxwinan, are sacred and still visited for ceremony.

Nobody talked much on the drive back. One of us had spent the morning wondering whether this was too much hike for him, and had said nothing.

“Did I let you know I was nervous?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“I’m glad we went.”

“Me too, Bub.”