The Wave in 3D: Walk Coyote Buttes Without a Permit

Striped Jurassic sandstone in an Arizona wilderness that admits only a handful of hikers each day. Here is how to explore The Wave and the Coyote Buttes in 3D with live Street View, from your iPhone.

The Wave is smaller than its photographs suggest. It sits in a shallow bowl of slickrock in Coyote Buttes North, on the Arizona side of the Arizona–Utah border, inside the Paria Canyon–Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness. Bands of red, cream and orange run through the stone in long curving lines, and the formation is compact enough that you can stand in the middle of it and turn a full circle.

Getting there is the difficult part, and it is difficult by design. The Bureau of Land Management issues only a small number of permits for Coyote Buttes North each day, awarded by lottery — one drawn months in advance, another decided a couple of days out for people already nearby. Most applicants do not win. Those who do still face a dirt approach road that turns greasy after rain, roughly three miles of walking each way with no marked trail, and summer heat that makes the round trip genuinely dangerous.

Which is why it helps to know the ground before you ever enter the lottery. You can study The Wave and the country around it today, in 3D, with live Street View along the roads that reach it, from your phone.

What makes The Wave special

The rock is Navajo Sandstone, laid down in the Jurassic when this corner of the Colorado Plateau was a desert of enormous wind-blown dunes. Those dunes hardened into stone, and the sloping internal layers of each one — the cross-bedding — are what you see today as stripes. The lines are not painted on the surface. They are the old faces of dunes, sliced open by erosion and left standing.

The Wave itself is a pair of intersecting troughs. Water running off the higher ground carved the channels, and wind funnelling through them since has smoothed and deepened the curves until the rock reads as something poured rather than eroded. The colour bands come from iron and other minerals carried through the stone by groundwater long after the sand had set, staining some layers deep red and leaving others nearly white.

What photographs cannot convey is the quiet. So few people are allowed in each day that you will often have long stretches of it to yourself, which is close to unheard of for a landmark this well known.

How to explore The Wave in 3D

MAPAS renders terrain in real three dimensions rather than as a flat tile, so a place like this — where the whole story is in the shape of the ground — actually makes sense on screen. You can tilt the plateau, rotate around the buttes, and drop into live Street View wherever roads exist.

For a first run, try this order:

1. Search for Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, Arizona and switch to 3D so the cliffs and the plateau above them separate into layers.
2. Zoom towards Coyote Buttes North, where the bare slickrock reads as pale swirled ground between darker patches of desert scrub.
3. Find Wire Pass Trailhead on House Rock Valley Road, the graded dirt road running south from US-89 between Kanab and Page.
4. Trace the line from the trailhead across the wash and up onto the sandstone, watching the climb rather than the distance.
5. Drop into live Street View on US-89 at the House Rock Valley turning to see what the approach looks like where the pavement ends.
6. Save the trailhead and use GPS navigation to find it in the dark on the morning of your permit.

Beyond Coyote Buttes

• Buckskin Gulch — reached from the same trailhead, one of the longest and narrowest slot canyons on the plateau.
• Coyote Buttes South — its own permit, far easier to draw, with striped cones and teepee formations of its own.
• White Pocket — a jumbled plateau of white and gold sandstone, no permit needed but a serious four-wheel-drive approach through deep sand.
• Horseshoe Bend — the Colorado River's tight meander near Page, a short walk from the highway.
• Kanab, Utah — the practical base, within reach of Zion, Bryce Canyon and Grand Staircase–Escalante.

What the terrain shows that a photograph does not

Almost every picture of The Wave is taken from inside the bowl, looking along the stripes, which hides the walk completely. In 3D the approach appears as it really is: an open desert basin, a sandy wash to cross, then a steady climb over bare rock with no path, no shade and no signage. Route-finding here is done by landmarks — a low saddle, a distinctive crack, a dark butte kept off your shoulder — because the permit comes with photographs rather than a trail map. Tilting the view until low light rakes across the slickrock makes those shapes legible in a way a flat overhead image never does.

Before you go

Spring and autumn are the sensible seasons: mild days, and a low sun in the late afternoon that brings the banding out. Summer on unshaded sandstone is severe and has killed hikers who underestimated it. Winter brings ice on the rock and mud on the road. Carry more water than feels reasonable, start early in any month, and tell someone your plan; phone signal out there is unreliable.

The rules are few and worth keeping. Walk on bare rock rather than the crusted soil between formations, keep off the delicate fins, and leave the stone unmarked. Permits are checked, and entering without one carries real penalties.

Common questions

How do I get a permit for The Wave?

Through the Bureau of Land Management's lottery, run online. There is an advance lottery you enter months ahead for a chosen month, and a daily lottery decided shortly before, which you must enter from within the local area. Both are heavily oversubscribed, so plan a trip that stands up whether or not your name comes out.

Is the hike difficult?

The distance is modest, but there is no trail, almost no shade, and route-finding across open slickrock in heat is the real difficulty. Hikers used to desert navigation find it manageable. Anyone without that experience should not treat it as a casual walk.

Is MAPAS free to use?

Yes. It is free on the App Store, needs no sign-up before you start exploring, and works on iPhone and iPad.

Most people who want to see The Wave will not draw a permit this year, or next. That is the bargain the place makes: the crowds stay small because the odds stay long.

Open MAPAS, tilt the plateau until the Coyote Buttes stand up out of it, and walk the approach in 3D — whether you are preparing for a permit or simply curious what those stripes look like from above.