The Wave is an area located on the Arizona, Utah border. It is an geological marvel, red sand stones carved into wave-like striations covers 6-miles of  Bureau of Land Mangement (BLM) Land. This is a geological formation that is unique only to this region, there is nothing else like it anywhere else in the world. I think I first saw a photo of the Wave as a Windows 98 (95?) screen saver and thought it was the most memorizing landscape I’ve ever seen. We’ve been wanting to go for quite sometime and have applied for a day use permit once earlier this year but was unsuccessful. Our friends and I decided to try again last week and we were granted 6 day use permit passes for hiking the Wave on Sunday, October 27 this year!

Photo of The Wave courtesy of Wikipedia 

The Quick and Dirty:

Location – Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, Arizona in Bureau of Land Mangement (BLM) Land, approximately 600 miles from Southern California.
How to Obtain Permit: PERMIT LINK, this is a lottery system, only 20 people are allowed into the Wave on a daily basis. During the high season, as many as 500 people apply per day. Ten daily permits each day are drawn through the lottery system and the other ten can be obtained a day before your intended hiking day. The lottery is drawing at the last day of each month for hiking permits four (4) months in advance, i.e. if you want to go in October, you must apply in June.
Fee– $5 nonrefundable fee to apply for the permit, once you are drawn for the permit, it is $7 per person/dog. The maximum amount of people on one permit is 6, I was lucky enough to score 6 permits for October.
Best Time – Your best chance of getting your hands on the permit is during the off-season, December-February
Special Conditions – High clearance is recommended for loose sands and clayey mud during rainy season
Tips – When choosing your hike date, be sure to choose the date with the least amount of applicants. The two times I’ve applied for this permit, I applied on the last day before the lottery closed, this way I can evaluate the most recent permit information.

Now we wait until October 🙂