Pssst. Lend an ear - and an eye.
This is about a spot on the map that's something of a secret. Not a state secret, mind you, but one of those places hikers-in-the-know talk about in low tones. They've experienced the stark beauty and the Zen-meditative peace to be found there. Professional photographers, too, pack in equipment to capture a striking landscape on film for coffee-table books and postcards, but rarely seem to employ the words "Coyote Buttes."The Buttes and Sand Valley, east of Kanab on the Utah-Arizona border, are part of the Bureau of Land Management's Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs wilderness. This is the region famous for the sinuous slot canyons of Buckskin Gulch and the Paria River. Unlike those clefts, however, this is a Colorado Plateau enclave of sunset-orange and cloud-white cliffs, with beehive-shaped cones, whale-back humps, an arch or two and a swirling labyrinth of intricately layered sandstone that has come to be called "The Wave."
"The rock," Dale Whitney told his brother Gary after hiking in on the first of two weekend permits, "is just ribboned with color."
Gary Whitney was the one who, by chance, learned about the Coyote Buttes, then passed word along to his brothers and a few friends.
"I'd gone to the Paria ranger station and had talked to a woman at the front desk, asking about areas to hike, because I'd never been there before," he said. "She got a pamphlet and we talked about Buckskin Wash, and I'd decided to hike Buckskin. At that time a ranger came in - I was looking at the bulletin board - and he asked her about how bookings were going for Coyote Buttes. She said they were booked into August - and this was March.
"I thought, `What kind of a place do they have that is booked five months ahead?' "
Entry into the Coyote Buttes wilderness is, he learned, restricted to two permits per day; up to four people are authorized per permit, which means the human population of the area can range from two to eight people each hiking day.
"I asked for any other information, and she didn't have any," Gary Whitney said. He signed up anyway. "We were looking into September. I thought I had enough time to find out about it, by getting topo maps and talking to people about it."
Still, he uncovered precious little background information. He learned that the main route into the Buttes is via the Wire Pass trailhead, also used by hikers heading into Buckskin Gulch. But the wilderness itself has no official trails at all and few of its popular landmarks - including The Wave - are marked on maps.
Except for restrictions in place to protect the wilderness area, the federal government is not intent upon keeping Coyote Buttes a secret, says Tom Folks, a recreation planner with the BLM's Arizona Strip Field Office in St. George.
"I don't know that I've read anything published about it," although there have been photographs in books and in magazines like Arizona Highways, he says. "All of the photographers - from National Geographic on down - think they're doing a really neat thing publishing pictures and not saying where it is. But that's not really working."
ADOZEN YEARS ago, few people had even heard of the Coyote Buttes and its pictorial star, The Wave. But that is changing, slowly but surely.
"A few years ago, Northern Arizona University did a survey of users, how they become aware of it," Folks says. "The top two were word of mouth and commercial photography"
Written information is harder to come by. Books about hiking in the Paria River drainage, for instance, generally fail to include the Buttes.
The Internet, however, has become a key source.
The area, and the permit program, are managed via a three-way partnership between the BLM, Northern Arizona University and the Arizona Strip Interpretive Association (known as ASIA). A $5 fee is assessed for each permit into the area, as part of the pilot federal funding program now under way in the national parks and forests.
Reservations and payment of fees can be done at the Paria ranger station, as Gary Whitney found, but in general the program is handled by the university in Flagstaff, Ariz., via the Internet, by mail and by fax. Student interns are also available at the contact station and, by arrangement, "on the ground," Foot says.
The Web can offer an excellent introduction to Coyote Buttes. One site, (www.for.nau.edu/pariapermits/cbform.html), includes NAU's scheduling calendar, by month, for more than a year in advance. The block for each date may be blank, indicating no reservations have been made, or will say "1 group" is arranged or the date is "filled," meaning the two permits have been assigned. November reservations are just about gone. December, as might be expected, is more open. Skip ahead to April 1998 and there are a few early days left, but after April 11 the permits are going fast.
Another NAU site, (www.for.nau.edu/paria-permits/coyinfo.html), tells the Web world, with photos, a map and in descriptive text, why the Buttes are gaining a name for themselves. The wilderness is, it says, "an area of spectacular scenery displaying domes, aprons, fins, corridors and a variety of small fragile rock sculptures carved in colorful swirling sandstone."
The geology of the area is not easy to explain: the geomorphology involves ancient seas and sand dunes, crossbedded sedimentation and eons of uplifting, warping and erosion.
Major features among the Buttes are color variations called Liesegang bands, says Becky Hammond, a BLM Arizona Strip geologist based in St. George. She tracks down the definition of these in the American Geological Institute's "Glossary of Geology." They are, she says, "secondary nested rings or bands caused by rhythmic precipitation within a fluid-saturated rock."
Hammond explains: Navajo sandstone can carry a lot of water, and groundwater has been moving through this rock for millions of years. As it moves, this fluid picks up minerals - iron oxides are the most common in this case - and move them around. "Iron oxides cause the color, so it will take the color from one place and move to another. You get the separation of colors, based on concentrations of oxides in groundwater.
"There's just been a lot of that in the Coyote Buttes area," she says.
Her theory, Hammond adds, is that proximity to the monoclinal fold called the Cockscomb has introduced even more water and mineral-laced hydrothermal fluids to the rock.
"Something else going on there is jointing, with small fractures in rock opened up by stresses," she says. "A lot of joints are filled with calcite, also from groundwater, which sticks up and makes fins. Those calcite fins and crusts of the sandstone are quite delicate and can break quite easily."
Crossbedding is a feature here that has produced amazing results. "One set of crossbeds will be one color and the next will be another color," and millions of years of faulting and erosion have exposed eye-popping designs.
Hammond's reaction to places like this? "The same as everyone else - that it's just beautiful."
THE REASONING behind the Coyote Butte's limited permit system is to both provide a certain amount of solitude and "to try to maintain the physical setting in there," Folks says. "In some of our surveys and in some of the planning meetings we've had, I think certain people are concerned about the condition of the area - that we not beat it to death. . . . Some people bring bad habits with them."
The BLM is in the process of doing a fresh environmental assessment that will look at the past year's fee demonstration project, as well as human impacts on the Coyote Buttes and Paria Canyon.
In Paria, especially, "we have too many people and too much waste," Folks says. "We're thinking of instituting limits in Paria and possibly revising the limits in Coyote Buttes in coming months," perhaps allowing a few more people into the latter. "If everything goes well, we should have something in the next two or three months, hopefully by the first of year."
For now, "I think the thing to remember is don't plan on going there tomorrow and walking in like anyplace else," Folks adds. Hikers "really need to plan ahead and realize the turnstile is pretty small.
And, without trails, finding specific formations can be a challenge too.
"It's amazing how many people come in upset they didn't find The Wave," Folks says. "If you don't have route-finding skills and all that, they get real frustrated. But it is a wilderness area, and that's part of the game."
Dale Whitney's party got some advice from a ranger hiking the area, who said "Head for the notch."
They went up the Wire Pass trail, made a right turn on the sandstone shelf above Sand Valley and subsequently noticed a cleft and an arch high on an opposing butte, across a shallow creek.
Along they way they admired the banded and striated rock, and paused at pockets of water, some alive with tadpoles and shrimp. In time the hikers ran smack into The Wave.
The flow of rock and color - thinly layered, as if revealing only the edges of ancient illuminated manuscripts - is spectacularly pretty. The stone itself is gently curved, seemingly carved and shaped over the eons by fine-grained sandpaper in an artist's hands. Recent rains had pooled the water in places, adding to the exotic beauty. A sky filled with billowy clouds added a fitting backdrop.
After oogling the elegantly crossbedded sandstone, the party clambered up the side of a mesa toward what a few of them called "Lunch Arch."
"Wow," Whitney said upon achieving that goal, the panorama spread before him.
Gary Whitney planned the same hike with his wife and friends the next day.
"How was it?" he asked when the first party returned to camp.
"Gary," said his nephew Jesse, "that was fabulous. It's one of the best things I've ever seen."
Gary's brother Dale had summarized his satisfaction nicely atop the buttes, with equal parts humor and wonder."
"This is," he told his companions, "probably the closest to heaven I'll ever get."
The Coyote Buttes area of the Paria Canyon/Vermilion Cliffs wilderness is accessible via a couple of routes, the main one being an offshoot of the Wire Pass Trail. Permits are required. Information is available on the Web. The Paria home page is (www.for.nau.edu/paria-permits/index.html). Or, call the Bureau of Land Management's Kanab office at 435-644-2672, or the Arizona Strip Field Office in St. George at 435-688-3200.