The Wave Hike

Well, out trip into Arizona’s famous sandstone formation ‘The Wave’ is now safely in the past. We have made it out to Arizona, back into the Coyote Buttes wilderness and eventually back to Pennsylvania safe and sound.

Here are my thoughts on hiking The Wave.

We’ve never really hiked in the real desert before. I did some northern New Mexico hiking at the Philmont Scout Rance about a billion years ago but that wasn’t a very rough desert. It was mostly a forest. Coyote Buttes is very different. It is the desert. It is not a forest.

The Bureau of Land Management (the custodians of Coyote Buttes) recommend a gallon of water per person for the hike. We figured we’d rather be safe than sorry so we planned to try to have about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 gallons of water each. For a day hike, that may sound like a lot but when you’re sweating in the desert it doesn’t feel like nearly enough.

Besides water, we have the maps from BLM and a compass (no map is complete without a compass) and my new Garmin GPS. I’m a technophile but I will not trust my life to a GPS alone. Sunblock and bug repellent are two necessities and we also packed food for a light trail lunch/snack.

To try to keep cool, we packed big brimmed hats (love my big brimmed hat) and Kafka Kool Ties that I found at REI. These are like bandanas but have some kind of water absorbing hard things sewn into them that swell when wet. They were an impulse buy when I was getting some other essentials (pack towels and NPS/BLM Interagency Pass) and they proved to be a very good buy.

I never hike anywhere without good solid boots. I have a pair of hiking shoes, but they’re not for serious hiking (for me at least). My ankles like being encased in leather. Good, tough leather.

We stayed in Page, Arizona. Specifically at the Courtyard in Page which is an excellent hotel. The in-hotel restaurant was very good and there is a Denny’s down the hill (more on the joys of Denny’s sometime later). We had about 40 miles of Arizona/Utah road to drive before 9 miles of dirt road back to the trailhead.

The paved roads are excellent and fast with a 65 MPH speed limit. We like those roads.

The dirt road back to the trailhead was another story.

I’m glad we got up at 2am to try to start the hike at dawn. We had a minor stupidity issue (all mine) but ended up getting to the dirt road without much incident. The 9 miles back to the trailhead took us about an hour. Yes. An hour. The road was washboard the whole way. Since we were driving Gina’s beloved CR-V we weren’t about to try to skim the tops of the ridges. To be honest even if we were in a rental I wouldn’t as a flat is a flat and I did not want to deal with that out in the middle of nowhere.

A more rugged off-road vehicle with very large, low pressure tires would probably have been much better.

Next time.

Let me say that the hike itself isn’t too bad. There are some slickrock scrambles and more deep sand than I like (which is exactly none) but it isn’t too difficult if you’re in some form of shape. It is over 3 miles from the parking lot (which is better maintained than the road with lots of nice gravel) with quite a few hills in between.

When you get your permit to hike to The Wave you are given a topo map of the area and very detailed instructions in full color with pictures. Use these instructions. Do not lose them. The instructions give you a half dozen waypoints that you can plug into your GPS to aid you in your navigation. These waypoints are in some weird format that I couldn’t get into my GPS correctly so we were always about 150 feet off. We used the directions and just kept the GPS on for gross navigation.

One word of advice: keep looking behind you. The directions are for getting you to The Wave they do not help get you back to your car.

There are cairns all along the route. They are made from piled red sandstone and can be nearly invisible. On our way back out we found ourselves stopping and hunting for way too many long, hot, minutes looking for the elusive red piles. That’s where the GPS’ tracklog helped. I could at least look at the screen and feel confident that we were headed in the right direction.

I was very glad I wore my hiking boots. The Vibram soles had great traciton on the slickrock and the leather uppers kept the sand out. There was quite a bit of sandy walking. It is unpleasant. We found the best way to ford our way through was to shorten our strides. That really helped. Snowshoes may have also been helpful.

Be very careful on the hike as there is a lot of fragile rock out there. Some of the sandstone sticks out edge-up which leaves very thin flakes of stone sticking up. They are easy to break and certainly irreplaceable. After I heard my boots make a crunching sound I was much more careful where I trod.

Still, sand sucks to hike through.

The Wave itself is pretty small. It is probably less than an acre in size which is good because if it were larger we would have needed more time to photograph it. As it was, we spent almost two hours there and took lots of pictures. I think that if we go back out I’ll spend more time taking closeups.

If you get out there, hike all around and be sure to look everywhere. Take lots of pictures. Use a wide angle lens and take some closeups.

On the way out we had some shade in a few places, but the way back was another story. When we left the car at 5:30 the temperature was about 56 degrees. When we got back to the car around 11:30 it was 102. That’s quite a swing.

We got a little bit lost on the way out. We thought we were following the cairns but somehow we ended up off track. My GPS showed us that we were off but we couldn’t find any confirmatory stone piles. Eventually Gina got us back on track as she recognized part of a dune (I have no idea how). As I said, keep an idea behind you as you hike out and watch those stone piles.

Much to my surprise I had some water left over. I only drank about 4 of the 5 quarts I’d taken. I should have drank more. Later that day I had a terrible headache (think bad hangover) from dehydration. It took more than a full day before I felt like myself again. Drink more water than you think you can.

If you go:

• Don’t go in the summer
• Take a GPS
• Keep watching behind you
• Drink lots of water
• Hike smart