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The Wave, Northern Arizona


The Wave is a very special place located in the north west corner of Arizona.  You can not just go there, you have to enter a lottery and hope you name gets pulled.  They do the drawing every month and I met one lady who has been trying for 6 years.  I've heard of others who waited 10 years.  Three of us went and one, Andy, submitted our names to the lottery and we got selected after only 4 months of trying.  Amazing.
Thank yoy Andy!
The hike in is about two miles and is rated from easy (seasoned hikers) to hard (people like me).  The trail is easily lost as much of the hike is on sandstone with no visible trail.  Then there is the soft sand part. Very difficult and when you are just about there and tired, you find yourself walking up a steep hill in VERY soft sand. When I got to the top I poured myself onto the hard sandstone that makes up The Wave and rested.  And then I started exploring and what a wonderous place it is.  What you see are layers of sandstone, that in the beginning were flat, level laters of sediment.  Over eons of time these deposits got warped by geologic forces.  And then eroded to produce this spectacular show of wavelike formations.
Geology tells a story.  I wish I had a geologist with me to decypher much of what we saw.  In the picture above and below you can see the striations of sandstone layers representing layers of time, much like the rings of a tree.  But what do you imagine caused the jumbled "mess" in this picture?  You can see the layers bending into it especially on the sides and bottom, but not so much at the top.  It's a mystery to me.  But then most of this place is a mystery in the sense that it contains so many twists and turns.  It leaves me breathless.

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