TRAVEL: Kanab, Utah, The Wave 4-23-15

Kanab arrival, dinner, Scrabble, and up early the next day to do the famous and unusual "Wave" hike.  Jane, Lanny and I all entered the Bureau of Land Management raffle for hiking permits to the Wave.  With three of us, I reasoned, mostly speculatively, that we would have a better chance at the 3 day window we were required to specify. 20 individuals per day are allowed in to protect the integrity of the unusual site.

And Jane got one!  According to the BLM website, about 5% of applications are selected during this period.  

First, a long drive 2 hours, to the trailhead on House Rock Valley Road, a gravel/sand/dirt road that runs N-S between 89 and 89A. Dire warnings abound, but unless it's raining, the road is passable for most cars.  I was glad we had a 4 wheel drive though.  

Lanny, always the stalwart techie 
scientist, spent his patience account learning to use Garmin GPS so we could hike alone.  The hike itself is poorly marked, and BLM supplies GPS waypoints and photos with landmarks (a generous description) of hiking points to direct one's steps.  Still, people get lost every year, and many hike it during hot summer, with 100+ temperatures.  

Our hiking day was cool, 68 degrees, and we were glad of it.

We hiked 3 miles in and out, mostly uphill on the way in, across slip rock and between rock formations, gazing at the amazing colors and the fitness of stratification - as if the cliffs had been plowed surgically with fine discs, the horizontal cuts interrupted with swaggering diagonals and contouring planes defining cliffs and nodes.

We clamored up the last sandy rock face to enter the Wave area. It's intense, dynamic, immediate, and perfectly named.  

The Wave has a harmony that is undeniable and irresistible - an ultimate testament to water and wind and their unyielding and triumphant power.

There is a discomfiture in being in the Wave's volumes. The upset of balance, the flamboyant and yet harmonious tweaking of the horizonal - the yielding and hardness.  

Yet it still remains a place at peace, in harmony.  Sedona should be envious at the power and beauty of this place.

And it wants you to come in and walk it.  It's easy - sandstone is so gritty, it helps you to climb up cliffs that look difficult at  first, and yet one still feels the flowing power, frozen for a few geological moments, changing constantly, and mostly with a slowness we cannot see but only know by reason.

What an appealing place to sit - its so easy to slow down, sit and watch and wonder, it comes to you with no effort, just a light champagne-like marvel at the privilege of wonder.

Flora 

Tufted Evening Primrose

A lovely pure large flower among the crannies - Wordsworth had it so correct - that turns pink as it fails and dies.

sand star

In the wash on the way into The Wave

The details in the sandstone are marvelous, too.

This raw scarification in one wall of the Wave was distinctive and singular.  It's like a navel, a place where a disconnect occurred, wrenching the flow free of its feed source.

Water evaporation here? Nipples, breasts, topography in miniature.

 Disorienting swirls that seem odd amidst the flowing perfection of the walls - some sandstone jelly roll of time's mixing.

Now I understand flowing water so perfectly.

And so goodbye to the Wave from a high viewpoint above, looking down at a marvel of earthly wonder.