Sunrise at the Wave

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the Wave, in Arizona’s Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, is the uncanny resemblance of its curving, uplifted layers of Navaho sandstone to an ocean swell that has encountered the shore, reared skyward, and begun to break. The multi-hued layers of stone sweeping upward toward the blue desert sky dramatically increase the viewer’s impression of an impending deluge that somehow never arrives. Add distant cliffs and spires bathed in golden sunrise light to the scene and the effect is positively surreal. I have spent decades exploring the Colorado Plateau, but I have never encountered more graceful sandstone forms than those preserved at the Wave.

As I noted in my description of Reflection at the Wave, the Wave’s origin story begins in the Jurassic era, 190 million years ago, when dinosaurs still stalked the earth and much of the American Southwest was covered by the largest sea of sand in geologic history. Towering sand dunes marched across the landscape, driven by winds that alternated periodically in direction. Over millions of years, those dunes solidified into layered Navaho sandstone. Some layers were produced when the wind steepened the lee slope of sand dunes beyond the angle of repose, causing sand to cascade down the face of the dune. Other layers were produced when the wind created ripples across nearly horizontal sandy surfaces. These layers eroded at different rates, driven by differences in the hardness of the layers. The layers also exhibit different colors—red, orange, pink, purple, yellow, and brown—as iron-rich fluids and ground water interacted with the porous sandstone. Erosion by periodic flash floods along a large joint in the Navaho sandstone gave the Wave its initial shape. Later, howling winds carrying abrasive sand particles further sculpted the layers into the astonishing forms we see today.

You can read the story of my nighttime hike to the Wave, and my fraught effort to shoot a total lunar eclipse from there, at Lunar Eclipse over the Wave.