The Vermillion Cliffs National Monument lies between the Grand Canyon and Utah border and contains the most bizarre landscape I've ever seen. Within the monument is an area called North Coyote Buttes, one of the most sought after locations for landscape photographers to visit. If you have a bucket list of places to see, definitely put the Vermillion Cliffs on it.
North Coyote Buttes covers a relatively large area, but its main attraction is a section called the Wave, a picture of which is shown below. Protected by the Bureau of Land Management, only sixty-four people per day are allowed to visit (it was just twenty people when my friend Will and I visited) and a lottery system is in place to manage the large number of people interested in securing a permit. To give you an idea of the odds of winning, over seven hundred people applied for a permit for the day I finally won mine (after ten years of trying), and this was for a spot during the summer when the temperatures typically exceed one hundred degrees. Heavy rainstorms in the days prior to our trip had thankfully dropped the temperatures to well below normal, although the resulting flash floods made the primary access road impassable, resulting in a much longer drive to the trailhead.
Reaching the Wave requires an seven mile roundtrip trek through unmarked desert, a good bit of which involves climbing up and down slickrock, hiking through sand and in our case, a short wade through a tight passageway. We ended up covering a lot more distance than that, as our Dreamland Safari Tours guide, Marjorie Casse, showed us many other nearby sights. It was a smart decision to hire a guide given the risks of getting lost or injured in this remote area and to ensure we would efficiently see the many highlights. The hike was my second time taking a guided trip with Dreamland and I can highly recommend their services if you will be traveling in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona. You can reach them at http://www.dreamlandtours.net.
Photographing the Wave is, unlike most landscape photography, best done at midday when the sun is directly overhead. Wide angle lenses work best for capturing the entirety of it and telephotos can be used to pick out the details of the amazing swirls and patterns in the Navajo sandstone rocks.
Less than a ten minute walk from the Wave takes you to the Second Wave.
And there are very unique rock formations in every direction.
I normally don't like to revisit places I've been before, but the experience of spending a day in North Coyote Buttes so exceeded my expectations I began playing the lottery again as soon as I returned home, and as luck would have it I won another permit for April of the following year. So it was back to our base in nearby Kanab, UT, for our follow up visit.
As we had only scratched the surface on our last visit, this time we decided to take a longer and more demanding route which involved hiking a couple of additional miles past the north side of the Wave, to visit several areas we had missed on our first trip.
First up was Hamburger Rock, with a view of the North Teepees in the distance.
Just past there we climbed three hundred feet up a mesa named Top Rock to visit Melody Arch.
And then the Alcove, a partially covered ampitheatre with a sand dune trapped within it.
However, the real payoff of investing the extra effort to take this longer route is the amazing bird's-eye view of the area around the Wave you take in from the edge of the mesa. It's a perfect spot to grab lunch and recharge for the rest of the hike.
From there, rather than retrace our steps, Will and I saved several miles of backtracking by carefully picking our way down the steep and somewhat intimidating cliff face to drop down close to the Wave. Fortunately our guide knew the safest route to descend.
By the time we had returned to the trailhead we had covered sixteen exhausting miles and (I think) seen much of the best that the area has to offer.
If you are planning a trip to southern Utah do yourself a favor and give the North Coyote Buttes lottery a shot. And if you are fortunate enough to secure a permit, and fit enough, make the extra effort to climb up Top Rock for a view of the Wave you’ll never forget. But if you strike out and don't win the lottery, there are two other amazing places worth visiting within the Vermillion Cliffs. One is South Coyote Buttes (another area that requires a permit, but one that is much easier to obtain) and the other is White Pocket. There's really no bad option to choose from when you visit the Vermillion Cliffs as each of these places are world-class destinations in their own right.
To view the full size versions of these images and several more, please visit my Vermillion Cliffs gallery.
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