Lunar Eclipse over the Wave

The days of preserving special places by keeping them secret are over. Case in point: the Wave, in Coyote Buttes, Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area, Arizona. The Wave is a small canyon, perhaps 50 feet deep, 20 feet wide, and 100 feet long. Time has warped the multi-colored sandstone layers that form the walls and floor of the canyon into graceful curves that in places give the startled viewer the impression that a massive wave is about to break over their heads. The Wave is so popular that the BLM, which manages the area, has implemented a lottery system for permits to visit the Wave. Permits sell out every day, according to a BLM ranger I spoke with.

In November 2025, as I was planning a February/March 2026 trip to the Grand Canyon with stops along the way, I applied for a permit to visit Coyote Buttes. I chose three possible dates (the maximum allowed) almost at random. To my delight, I received a permit for March 3rd. Only later did I learn that I had happened to pick the date of a total lunar eclipse. And not only that: it would be my last chance to shoot a lunar eclipse for three years.

Was it even possible to reach the Wave, a place I had never visited, at night? The Wave is about three miles from the trailhead. There is no visible trail and only a few cairns lead hikers across the trackless sandstone that forms most of the route. Camping is not allowed. The lunar eclipse would begin at 2:51 a.m., and I would need to arrive an hour earlier, if possible, to find a composition, get set up, and start shooting at least 10 minutes before the eclipse began. I wanted to make a “string of pearls” image by locking down a wide-angle composition and making a bracketed set of images every five minutes as the moon moved through the frame, thereby capturing two images of the full moon, and then every phase of the eclipse.

The BLM’s website was full of warnings about how easy it was to get lost on the way to and from the Wave. The agency has apparently expended so much time and manpower looking for lost hikers that it has published a brochure with photos of prominent landmarks along the route along with GPS waypoints for key locations. Of course, I would be trying to identify those landmarks by moonlight. Fortunately, GPS receivers work just fine at night, so I loaded the BLM’s waypoints into my receiver and created a route. In addition, I discovered that the Hiking Project mobile app has the route to the Wave in its database. After downloading the route, the app would display the route on a map on my phone. A moving dot would indicate my position as I hiked. If I could align my green circular avatar with the line representing the route, I would have another way to stay on track in the dark.

Even with those two tools at hand, however, it seemed like a daunting task to reach the Wave in the dark. And even if I succeeded, I would then face an even bigger challenge: composing a pleasing photo in the middle of the night with the Wave as the foreground. Data on the position of the moon during the eclipse was easy to find, but it proved much harder to get a sense of which direction I would be looking when viewing the most interesting parts of the Wave. Searching online for images was no help. Perhaps the most interesting parts of the Wave were positioned such that it would be impossible to include the moon in the composition. There was no way to know except to go and find out.

After shooting a spectacular sunrise from Hopi Point, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, I drove to Stateline Campground, which is near the trailhead for the Wave, and camped. I set my travel alarm for 11:00 p.m. – or thought I did -- tucked the alarm into the fleece hat I always wear to bed when I’m camping, turned out my headlamp at 7:30 p.m. and dozed off. A couple of hours later I awoke briefly and checked my alarm clock. 10 p.m. One hour to go. I dozed off again.

Some indeterminate time later, I awoke with a vague sense of dread. It seemed like much more than one hour had passed. I pulled my alarm clock out from under my hat. 12:15 a.m.! I had indeed set my alarm for 11:00 p.m. – then forgot to turn the alarm on.

I was already an hour and a quarter behind schedule. I bolted out of my sleeping bag, instantly awake, adrenalin pumping, drove frantically to the trailhead, and started hiking, all the while revising the schedule in my head. If I could navigate three miles of intricate route-finding in the dark in an hour and a half, I would have just 25 minutes to find a composition, dial it in, and focus in the dark. Composing the shot would be tricky. Setting up the shot to include the moon at the beginning of the eclipse would be relatively straightforward. The hard part would be predicting the azimuth of the moon when it set below the skyline. My composition had to include the moon throughout the entire eclipse sequence. I had created a table of moon positions during the eclipse, but I would still have to make accurate compass measurements in the dark.

After an hour and a half of pulse-pounding hiking punctuated by brief stops to reset the compass with the bearing to the next waypoint, I arrived at the Wave. Even though I could only see the Wave by the light of my headlamp, my first reaction was, “Wow!” Immediately I saw that while I couldn’t include the moon in the classic view of the Wave, a second-best composition was quite possible. I set up as fast as I could and made the first exposure with just seconds to spare.

Every five minutes for the next three hours I shot another bracketed set of images. The moon was still partially eclipsed when it set below the horizon. With the moon exposures in the can, I concentrated on achieving full depth of field in the land portion of the image. Although it was still well before sunrise, a glow along the eastern horizon was already starting to light up the cliffs to the west that filled the right side of my frame. Once I felt confident that I had made the land images, I spent a delightful hour shooting other images of the Wave. After shooting every angle I could think of, I finally put the camera away just as the first of an endless stream of hikers arrived. For seven hours, I had had the Wave to myself, a rare treat at a place so internationally famous you have to win a lottery to visit.