Trail Report: The Wave, Arizona

After spending a day hiking around Zion National Park, we spent another night in Hurricane and left early Sunday morning and headed towards The Wave, in Arizona.The drive from Hurricane to The Wave is about 2 hours. One thing we forgot to take into account was the time difference between Utah and Arizona, since this was before day lights savings time, we actually gained an hour going from Utah to Arizona and made it to the trail head around 7:30 AM. Once you turn off from Hwy 89 onto Red Rock Canyon Road, the road becomes unpaved and this last 10 mile stretch will take about 30 minutes depending on the road condition and weather. Based on our permit, a high clearance, 4WD vehicle came highly recommended but since there was no rain in the recent forecast, we decided to test out the road with our 2WD. The trail was surprisingly well maintained and luckily, we arrived at the trail head with no problems.

My recommendation for anyone who wants to drive a 2WD to The Wave is to check the weather forecast and make sure there is no rain predicted in the forecast. The  soil is fine and clayey on the road, with rain, it would be VERY easy to get stuck.

The Wave

The start of the trail, note the bright pink permit I had to hang off my backpack. Only 20 people are allowed on this trail per day.
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Scoring Day-Use Permits for The Wave- Arizona

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!

The Wave, Arizona

Photo of The Wave courtesy of Wikipedia 

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