Sara and I have been trying to get a permit to hike the wave almost since Memorial Day last year. It took us about 6 months of getting into the online lottery to get a spot and we were very surprised to get a slot the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend.
The Wave is a rock formation located on The Wire Pass trailhead between Page, AZ and Kanab, UT. You need a permit to hike to it and when you get your slot they send you the instructions to get there.
We started our journey by driving from OC to Kanab and stayed a very clean, inexpensive place called Aikens Lodge…
After getting settled in we went for dinner at The Three Bears, which is a local place that was more popular for ice cream than food. We ate dinner and also had some of their awesome ice-cream…
We unpacked enough to stay overnight and to pack our backpacks for the hike to the wave in the morning. We decided to get a early start to the good light of the morning for taking pictures and to beat the heat of the day.
The drive to the dirt road was easy, but it was quite a ways on the dirt, rocky road before we came to the Wirepass Trailhead.
We parked and checked out the map….
signed the trail register
We were armed with our map and a handheld GPS and we started off on the path to the find the wave…
Much of the first part of the hike was sand and small desert plants….
As we hiked on it moved more onto rock and climbing up and over the sides of Hoodoo’s.
Here is Kari leading the way to a set of Hoodoo’s – aren’t they nice, which lead our way to the next step in the hike…
The rock turned into sand as we made our way up this sand hill following the path to the wave. It is interesting that with so much sand and rock there are very few footprints left showing you where other people have hiked or even where you hiked to get there earlier in the day….
We were very excited when we got here to the entrance of the wave….
After entering the wave the sun started to hit the interior rock – and we were really amazed at the beauty revealed….
Check out this video of us walking into The Wave
We feel really lucky to have received a lottery spot to see the wave….we met hikers when we got there from China, Hawaii and Germany who had waited over a week trying each day to get in…it is truly amazing.
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