After 5 years of miserable luck attempting to acquire a permit for The Wave trail, (spent probability over $50 because drawing is not nonrefundable) I finally decided to attend an in person lottery.
Since the application for the walk in permit lottery starts at 8:30 am, I set up a brilliant plan to drive from LA to Vegas on 9/4 Friday night, leave the motel and continue to drive 3 hours to Visitor Center in Kanab UT the next day.
My plan stayed brilliant until I found out there's somehow an one hour time zone shift if I enter Kanab city where the visitor center is, we will be there an hour late for the drawing...
Perhaps we were all too tired in the morning, the sense of disappointment didn't even cross my mind. We sat at the empty picnic area to make breakfast sandwiches. I bought so much food and protein bars to limit human contacts for our trip.
Here are quick tips for anyone who wants to try getting an in person permit.
1) You can fill out a lottery application starting at 8:30am.
2) Lottery is for the next day.
3) Permit drawing takes place at 9:00 am.
4) Check MDT time zone.
5) Come with a 4x4, a higher chassis car.
Toadstool Hoodoos was probably one of the few hikes we could do in the area without risking sinking my car into deep sand. We didn't visit Utah at the right timing, this could be not only bad but the worst week to come considering the heat wave alerts were all over the news.
This is a less than 2 miles hike with almost non-existent elevation, but the 100°F blinding heat before 10 am that day made it indescribably hard to finish.
I brought TT his tiny boots, I purchased them after visiting Chemehuevi Mountains back in 2016, we never had a chance to use them until now.
Tiru's bleeding paws that day definitely showed me how ignorant I am as a pet owner, now I pay more attention to the ground temperature for TT.
We fled the area hoping to check in to the motel without knowing the earliest check in time is 2 pm, bummer.
Around 11:30 am the heat climbed higher, The Chains was the closest destination we could visit to kill some time at that point, and it didn't let us down, although my brain almost fried.
Plenty of people were chilling around the water, I have no idea how they managed to stay out under over 100°F direct sunlight. Me and Quentin agreed to come back out later in the late afternoon, even fully submerging in the water, this unfriendly blazing sun just too much to bear.
At this point we were so confused about the actual time in the day because entering Page switched us back an hour again, two of our phones showed different times, my car showed another, we decided to check out one more spot to kill time.
I panicked when I saw a toll station at the Horseshoe Bend entrance, we were too naive to believe we could casually stroll around and come back another time later to get a different sun angle photograph of this incised meander. Nope, not if you want to pay 2 times, and it was too late for us to back out from the driveway.
A one mile hike shouldn't be a problem for me, but I was totally defeated by the heat, we stopped multiple times under designed resting shade (which they probably utilized the toll money to build) just for me to gather strength to walk another 5 minutes. There were visitors hiking with huge parasols, certainly something I should consider copying next time.
The view was well worth the pain and breath taking, we met some dog owners who had to carry their dogs but TT did it all by himself. To have a better photo of him with this scenery I should have brought my Gopro and the extension stick, oh well.
After washing off all the dirt and sweat at the motel, we fell dead on the bed, swimming? maybe tomorrow... TT also went straight to sleep without doing his usual hours of patrolling in the room.
