The Wave at Night
Night One - The Wave, White Pocket, & Valley of Fire S.P. - 2025
After insane amounts of planning and an arduous hike at night across the desert, I took perhaps the greatest photograph I’ll ever take.
The Milky Way and The Wave
Reaching The Wave requires undertaking a 3.4 mile / 5.5 kilometer hike across desert terrain without any path or trail markers.
The 1st of December 2024 was the day I received the greatest email of my life. Its subject:
Coyote Buttes North Advanced Lottery (The Wave) Lottery Results Announcement - Congratulations!
When I saw that email pop into my inbox, I knew immediately my many years’ long quest to secure a Wave permit had finally come to an end. Between advanced and geo-fenced local lotteries, I had applied for a permit over 70 times. Seventy. I screamed so loudly my neighbors told me later they thought I was being attacked. I’ve never shaken from excitement before, but I actually started shivering. For many years the footer of this very webpage read: Just a Simple Photographer Waiting For a Wave Permit - no longer! After composing myself, I read through the email - the final line?
Celebrate your Coyote Buttes North (The Wave) March 2025 Permit Lottery award, and we look forward to seeing you on Thursday, March 27, 2025!
“Way, way, way ahead of you,” I thought.
Being an intelligent person (you’re here, aren’t you?), you’ve probably figured out that I only had a little less than four months to book a flight, secure lodging, request time off from work, and prepare for what will likely be my one and only chance to get the photograph I’ve wanted to take for over a decade.
See, I was on a quest: to get a photograph of the Milky Way rising high above The Wave. To achieve this goal, every single time I applied for a Wave permit was during a moonless night, and this time would be no different. There is quite a bit working against someone trying to photograph The Wave and the Milky Way at the same time:
During the winter months, the Milky Way is too low in the sky and doesn’t rise sufficiently high enough to be photographed,
During the winter and sometimes late fall / early spring, snow covers the bowl in which you find The Wave,
While the Milky Way is most prominent during the summer months, the nights are significantly shorter (also, the days are unbearably, even dangerously, hot), and,
As Wave permits are only valid from Midnight to Midnight, and accessing The Wave requires a 90-minute hike, you can only arrive on-site as early as 0130 in the morning or stay only as late as 2230 in the evening.
Thinking about all of these factors, I realized that securing a permit for the end of March was about as good an option as I could get. Now to figure out if I needed to be at The Wave first thing in the morning, or stay as late as possible into the evening.
Firing up Stellarium and using a Google 360 View import hack I use for total eclipses, it became clear that I had about a two-hour window between when I could safely and realistically arrive at The Wave and the start of astronomical twilight.
Speed was paramount: not only speed in hiking to The Wave, but also speed in setting up equipment. I watched as many videos as I could concerning how to get to The Wave, to include what landmarks to look for along the way (any advantage in the dark on a moonless night would be key to not getting lost). I prepared my equipment as best as I could in advance, making sure I knew exactly where all my equipment would be and what settings to initiate when. I planned out the whole night’s shooting sequence. In short, I rehearsed this whole event because -legitimately- minutes mattered.
Two days prior to permit day, I flew into Las Vegas Airport and secured my pick-up truck rental vehicle. Having traveled on House Rock Road before, I knew the road conditions can be challenging and … well, better safe than sorry. After crossing into Utah and having some good luck In-and-Out Burger in Washington, I continued on to Kanab, Utah where I checked into my lodging for the next few days.
Permit winners are required to attend a safety briefing the day prior to their journey in either Kanab or Page, Arizona and I dutifully complied. Being intentionally tired (I wanted to conk out around 5PM that evening), I felt the weight of my eyelids as the lecture went on. I perked up when the ranger providing the briefing said:
We strongly discourage you from hiking to The Wave at night - there are no trail markers, no hiking paths, and no way for us to find you if you get lost. Also: there are mountain lions there which hunt at night.
I smiled politely knowing full-well I’d ignore that advice.
At about 2230 that evening, I woke, threw my pack into my rental truck, and set off for the trailhead. Driving across the high desert of Utah at night is one of those surreal experiences I cannot describe well: the only thing you may see for ten, twenty minutes or more is the space illuminated by your car’s headlights. In the odd chance you see lights coming towards you in the distance, it may take several minutes more for them to reach you. Otherwise, it is just darkness. But this would be nothing compared to hiking on a moonless night in the desert.
My plan was pretty straightforward: arrive at the trailhead in time to boil some water, eat about four packets of instant oatmeal (my last meal until that evening) and drink about three cups of coffee. Shortly after midnight, I stepped off into the dry stream bed of Coyote Wash along the Wire Pass Trail to meet my fate.
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About .6 miles / one kilometer down the wash, a spur trail rises up a small hill off of the established Wire Pass Trail - this is the way to The Wave. I noticed the placard affixed to the fiberglass post warning me that I was entering a permitted area was pretty reflective from a distance - I thought it was a mountain lion for a split second, and pondered how disappointed the ranger at the safety briefing would be if I got taken down by a large cat. I then thought it would probably be best if I made some noise, so I pulled out my last-gen iPod, threw on some Iron Maiden, and blasted it on stereo. That’ll show them.
For the most part there was total darkness along this part of the path; thankfully, for the next .6 miles / kilometer there was a relatively well-defined track in the sand and the glean of light reflected off of the Bureau of Land Management’s trail cameras, and I gleefully flashed my bright pink access permit each time I passed by one!
Soon, however, the path emptied out into a large slick rock basin featuring a large rock wall on the west / right side of the path. I knew from my planning I had to stay relatively close to that rock wall for some distance, but not too close as it was a good ambush location for mountain lions.
Your mind really starts to mess with you when you are hiking in total darkness and total silence, so when my headlamp once again reflected off something far into the distance, I paused and listened. Nothing, absolutely nothing making noise out there. But what was that reflection? It was pretty close to the rock wall, so I marched forward. And then I saw it … a bright reflective arrow on a placard atop another one of those fiberglass posts. “No way,” I thought. “Could there be another?”
I cranked my headlamp to maximum brightness, took it in my hand, and held it aloft shining its LED magnificence into the black void. And barely -just barely!- in the distance could I make out another reflection. I headed into that direction.
There are a couple of tricky spots of navigation along the route to The Wave (figuring out how to squeeze between Plateau Rock and the aforementioned rock wall being the most prominent), but -even in the dark- the navigation wasn’t proving super challenging. Before long, I had walked from Utah into Arizona at which point the track started becoming incredibly sandy. I knew from my notes that around this point I had to look at the bluff ahead of me and find a notch between two rock faces, behind which would be The Wave. Holding the headlamp aloft again, I found notch atop an incredibly long and steep sandy hill.
I’m sure in retrospect there was an easier way to reach The Wave than hiking directly up the gigantic sandy hill, but at the time I was simply dead-reckoning to the opening between the cliffs. After about ten minutes of tremendous struggle, I finally reached a small rock ledge which I knew would bring me up to The Wave. The anticipation was killing me!
Even in the darkness, you know the moment you are about to round the corner into the gigantic earth bowl in which The Wave sits as the sandstone beneath your feet becomes increasingly banded and striated. Making my way up the gentle hill I could see the space above getting larger and larger. I knew I was incredibly close. I actually stopped and waited … it sounds melodramatic as all hell, but from that moment forward, every moment of my life would be one after I saw The Wave for the first time. I wanted to savor it.
Even in darkness, the beautiful brilliance of the rock was captivating. I shone my light across the tremendous bowl but was only able to uncover a few of its great secrets. Anyway, I’d have all day for that - now it was time to get what I came for!
I set up my equipment as quickly as possible and began to run my series according to plan. A little behind schedule, I had about one hour and forty minutes to collect data. As per usual, I started with a very long low ISO foreground photograph, then went into the series of 25-second exposures which would make up the background of the shot. Once that sequence started running, I had nothing to do but to sit around and wait for either astronomical twilight or another visitor’s flashlight. Obviously I was hoping for the former….
That was the most peaceful 100 minutes I’ve ever had traveling - just me and The Wave. And I had it all to myself!
