Everyone knows about The Wave trail in North Coyote Buttes, in North-Central Arizona. You know, the one where you apply for permit through recreation.gov that’s near-impossible to get.

In January of this year, we’d applied for permits for both Angel’s Landing and The Wave for the same week period. I laugh now about how confident we were haha.

We won Angel’s and lost The Wave, but we were still craving similar scenery.

So, in walks Valley of Fire State Park…

When we made our first pass through the Southwest last summer, Valley of Fire State Park’s trails were mostly closed just like they are every year from May to October to protect hikers from dying from the heat.

January seemed like the perfect opportunity to try again, especially since they have the Fire Wave Trail which I’d read was really beautiful and could fill The Wave-shaped hole in my heart.

We woke up super early and drove 2.5 hours to the park, trying to get there as early as possible to beat the eventual midday heat – which we knew would still be blisteringly hot despite the season.

The park costs $10 for Nevada cars & $15 for non-Nevada cars.

Fire Wave trail

The Fire Wave trailhead is pretty deep into the park, so we basically drove past every other thing we cared about in order to get out spot in the parking lot with plan to backtrack later.

There are plenty of signs on the park road to instruct you, and there’s only one main road in the park anyway. Parking is on both sides of the road, in two ungoverned rows each. We parked in the left lot (where we’d knew we’d exit the trail), and the start of the trail was on the other side of the road.

The start is not very well marked at all. It’s basically a sandy hill into the canyon and I would’ve definitely felt we were going the wrong way if it wasn’t for all of the other people there with us.

Almost right away, you come across the main pink-bacon-land part, where everyone takes awesome photos of the multicolored swirly marbling for which the trail is named.

It was beautiful! And hot. And did I mention beautiful?

We have only ever run out of water on a hike three times in our journeys together, and this was one of those times. Don’t let the one Nalgene in my hand fool you, Ike’s backpack was filled to the brim with water bottles. We did come prepared with breakable ice packs though, thank God.

When we go in the future, we’ll for sure double up on our water supply. It’s really insane the amount of hydration your body needs down there, I can’t adequately explain it. We totally understood how this place can be life threatening. There’s no shade 99% of the time and, as you can see, no clouds whatsoever.

After Bacon Land, as you’re passing above and looking down on the Pastel Pink Canyon (we walked above because it was flooded out due to recent storms), while facing the road, there’s an amazing rainbow hill.

In this area, there’s a few amazing butt-shaped cubbies to sit within the rock face. That’s where Ike was sitting while taking the two photos of me below, if that makes sense? The rock was cool to the touch and worked sooo well to give us a chilly break before continuing down into the canyon.

The sites on this hike are the Fire Wave itself (aka Bacon Land), the Pastel Pink Canyon, and a slot canyon or two. The canyons are the only shade here and they feel like walking into the most comfortable refrigerator.

You also pass White Domes and the Seven Wonders… but we were so tired and hot that I didn’t care to pay attention by that point. Did we see them? Maybe. I told myself I’d Google the formations haha my patience was absolutely demolished.

Here’s the 3.5 mile loop AllTrails: https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/nevada/
fire-wave-white-domes-seven-wonders-loop

One of the things that kept my spirit up was that we were pacing with a very friendly, older, married couple from Wisconsin. They were wearing their matching Green Bay Packers gear and it was so cute. We tooks tons of pictures together back and forth haha.

There were so many amazing patterns and colors within the rock walls, it was so cool. Like, how in the world did those straight striations (below) happen UNDER the edge? Makes no sense. And these diamond shapes?

The exit for the trail is not very well marked either, and our brains were mush by the time we were trying to find it – even with the map we’d downloaded from AllTrails. The signage sucks. I’m not blaming the park, but it’s just fact you should be prepared for.

We ended up getting to a higher vantage point to see better, and then we got lucky and followed someone casually walking their dog (?) back to the parking lot which was actually much closer than we thought. Just be careful, don’t let your nerves or the heat convince you to make silly decisions.

When we got back to the truck, the first thing we did was open the back to sit in the shade, strip down, chug water, and I immediately started chowing down on chili cheese Fritos (my fav guilty pleasure snack). By the time we were there, both parking lots were totally full.

Honorable mention for the other cool stuff we saw*~

After collecting ourselves, we backtracked on the main park road to Atatl Rock (petroglyphs) and the Historic Cabins (more petroglyphs, and the stone cabins that Civilian Conservation Corps members lived in in the 1930’s & 1940’s).

More on both of those later, they were so cool and absolutely deserve their own spotlight. We also drove through the Beehives parking lot, checked out the petrified log on the side of the road, and stood in the parking lot to gaze up at Elephant Rock (the most underwhelming thing in the world and no one can convince me otherwise) and take this cute polaroid photo.

Also, the visitor center was closed because they were doing a stock count in the gift stop. It totally bummed me out because I collect stickers, so if you care about that kind of thing maybe check on it before you go. (And of course they were open they day before, and the day after… sigh.)

So, summary: The Fire Wave trail was awesome and I highly recommend. The pink, orange, white, and red pastel swirls within the rocks are surreal. It truly feels like you’re on another planet and of course photos do not do any justice to the scale you feel there. And pleeease act like you are a camel and bring so much water that you feel embarrassed of yourself haha, trust me you’ll need it. ❤

Valley of Fire homepage, with each site listed separately:
https://www.valley-of-fire.com/

Valley of Fire State Park via Nevada State Parks:
https://parks.nv.gov/parks/valley-of-fire

Fire Wave, Pink Canyon, White Domes, and 7 Wonders loop via AllTrails:
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/nevada/
fire-wave-white-domes-seven-wonders-loop

Apply for ‘The Wave’ trail in North Coyote Buttes via Recreation.gov:
https://www.recreation.gov/permits/274309