A Wave in the Desert

Angie arrived in LA early on the morning of 10 July, and despite Jonno’s big hopes for a romantic reunion and to regale her with tales of his Mt Logan escapades, she promptly fell asleep and stayed that way for the next two days, battling jet lag and the aftermath of too much fun in the weeks before leaving Australia.

Not dissuaded, with one eye on the road and the other intently focused on Sherman’s  temperature gauge, Jonno drove straight to a small town in northern Arizona called Page, eager to get onto the trail for the first of our long-awaited forays into the American wilderness. Our first was to be to a rock feature nearby called the Wave. As we bumped along a ridiculously corrugated dirt road during the night, Angie marvelled at how Jonno had stumbled across this seemingly obscure and exciting hike for us. Taking advantage of Angie’s jetlag, we woke up at very early next morning and set off in the darkness, with our trusty internet printout guiding us through dry creek beds, across little sage fields and over saddles and rock features in our mission to reach the Wave by sunrise.

We weren’t disappointed – the multi-coloured layers of sandstone had been carved out by rock and water into the most beautiful and mesmerising curved walls and patterns.

We scrambled around the Wave for 45 minutes, delighting in the colours and textures, and commenting on how sad it was that the other couple of folk we’d seen parked at the trailhead probably didn’t even know that this was here.

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A few days later, in a chance encounter with another adventurous fellow we met in Zion , we learned that the Wave is in fact one of the most prized features in Utah, and that access is heavily restricted : the Navajo nation in fact run a lottery permit system that people have been waiting for years to come and explore! Yikes!!

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