On a solo hiking trip in the desert the last week of October, I shared 5 hours in a middle school gym in Kanab, Utah with over 100 other COVID-masked travelers hoping to get permission to enter one hike on my list.
After hiking with friends in the San Rafael Swell for the weekend, I left Green River for Kanab. The predicted cold front snarled traffic back home in Colorado and delivered driving snow far to the west and south across my path. The wind was whipping in Kanab at dusk. Nighttime temperatures were predicted to reach a low of 24 degrees. My plans shifted from camping to finding a cheap motel a few blocks from the Kanab Center where the lottery was held. Why not give it a try? If I didn’t win, there were plenty of bucket-list “Plan B” hikes in the region that I’d researched. I didn’t often have the chance for 5 days of open schedule to explore, and I hadn’t been to this corner of Utah for a decade.
It was cold enough Monday morning, October 26th that the Kane County Office of Tourism employee and a BLM colleague who were together in charge of the lottery looked the other way as people who were not trip leaders entered the gym to wait inside. There was more than enough room for the 100 to 150 people to disperse across the gym floor and bleachers. For a middle school basketball game, it would have been a modest turnout; for a Disney ride, a slow day.
There was something comfortingly small-town about people from around the West bundled up with coffee mugs, waiting on bingo-balls in a basketball gym where a mural proclaimes, “this is Cowboy Country.” As a lone traveler, it felt a little social even if practically everyone was glued to their smartphones. Whether it was COVID, the cold, or something else, chatter was minimal.
The irony of waiting to enter a couple square miles of slickrock while visiting a place surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of public lands with more than enough other fantastic hikes that I’ve been hoping to do for over 20 years was not lost on me. What was I hoping that a ticket to “The Wave” would mean for me that the tens of other options on my list wouldn’t?
Each morning for three days we stood outside at 8:00 a.m. to receive instructions, enter, then stand in line again to fill out forms and wait for that day’s lottery for entry to “the Wave” to begin. Returning the second and third days, I knew the routine. I walked to the front after the doors opened to have my application assigned a new number for the day. By day 2, I had found where to get coffee that early in town and learned to save my morning Yoga for the hour wait in a corner of the gym. I began to recognize a few folks. On Monday, I was #6, Tuesday #1 and Wednesday #1. A little familiarity was a benefit of losing.
Oddly, there wasn’t much chatter between applicants. There were protocols to prevent people making deals. I stuck out for trying to chat up people around me. I kept asking if holding a lottery for a permit to access for day use was the future of our public lands? I asked a few if they had ever done something like this for a hike before. It was a question most nodded “no” to or shrugged off.
Each day, only 10 people from the lottery would be granted permits for the following day. A trip leader could submit for a group of up to 6 people, so on some days, there could be as few as two numbers called. Everyone who might go on a permit needed to be listed. Anyone listed on multiple applications would disqualify all on those applications. On these three days, there were a lot of one and two person groups. Monday, there were 73 trip leader applications, Tuesday 72, and then 62 on Wednesday. More than 5 bingo-ball numbers were called each day.
The cold weather made some us hopeful for better odds. Kyle Zeyer, the local BLM official who ran the Tuesday lottery with his wife, Nicole who works for the Kane County Tourism Office noted that the previous week there had been days with over 200 applicants. The winning 10 people would be issued permits to navigate a tract of BLM land 60 miles away down a rough 8-mile road where they would personally discover a place the BLM called Coyote Buttes North and presumably post later that day on some social media platform to show the beauty, intrigue they experienced, and thereby extend the locations fame and increase the lines at next year’s lottery. Internationally, the spot was known as “the Wave.” Sitting in a gym for a lottery chance to enter meant I was already within its gravitational pull.
On the third day, I stopped by the Kane County Office of Tourism down the road before leaving town to talk with Nicole Zeyer who was at the information desk. She explained how Kane County partnered with the BLM to offer the larger space in the Kanab Center once social distancing made holding the lottery in the local BLM offices unsafe in June. Clearly, all the attention was good for business. Kanab is equal distances from Zion, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell and Bryce Canyon National Park which has helped grow the lodging base over the years. Few “small towns” under 5,000 without a major ski resort, even in the high country of Colorado can boast of 6 or more new major chain hotels as well as tens of other apparently thriving local lodging establishments. That said, Kanab is still a long way from anywhere.
Though there are stories on the web of a screensaver being the catalyst, I asked Zeyer for the local version of how the Wave became so popular. She said local lore was that an illegal European movie was filmed there. Then a photo of it became a screen saver for a software company. Soon after, the location was tagged and “exploded on Instagram.” Since then she noted, “many people have placed it on their bucket list.” “It is not a big area, too small for the number of visitors who want to go there.” The lottery became one way to manage access. I lamented not having hiked the length of nearby Paria Canyon which also requires competitive permits when I first wanted to do so 25 years ago. “Yeah, there was no one here then.”
In spite of how boring it must be for the handful of locals who rotate managing the lottery, nearly every day of the year, it must be enough of a boon to Kanab and Kane County for the voluntary partnership between the County and the federal agency to thrive. Revenues from the lottery go to the BLM, but the County also has a lodging tax. Having visitors hang around, as I did, eating meals, staying in town even for a remote chance at a permit must be good for business. From the temperament of the 5 people I met who managed the event over those three days, they were business-like, patient and kind. They added an air of normalcy to the very strange concept of visitors from around the world waiting on their number to be called on a bingo wheel to get to go for a hike the following day. If it were not clearly a tool to protect the land, and manage visitor experience, one might suspect it were an exercise in fabricated scarcity; an ingeniously diabolical propaganda tool.
Those of us who love travel across the West are having to get used to how land management agencies are adjusting to the increased demand to get outside. Waiting in a gym to possibly hike to “the Wave” wasn’t my first plan. The week before leaving, I realized there was not a single unreserved campsite within miles of Zion National Park. With social distancing, even riding a shuttle into the park to hike would have required on-line reservations booked weeks ahead of my last minute plan. I thought I might ride my bike into Zion and then climb to Angel’s Rest. I dropped that plan after observing the 5-day forecast. The word on Zion on the web was that it was overwhelmed with visitors this year anyhow. I had the resources for more remote travel. I remembered Kanab as quaint while passing through more than a decade ago. That day there had been thunderstorms and there were mudflows through at least three drainages in and around town. I hadn’t done scouting then; I planned to this trip.
After my first morning in the Kanab gym, I started to talk to people I recognized. I met Alex from Salt Lake City who was hoping to surprise his wife and 12 & 14-year old kids with an adventure. I met Dan from Fort Worth who drove overnight alone through snow all the way to Kanab to give the lottery a try for 4 days. I met Hannah, a BLM botanist from Redmond, Oregon with whom I shared notes on alternate hikes across SW Utah. I met Jamie from Salt Lake City, a 60-something who was there with her much older mother. She said she had applied “12 plus” times this year “on-line or in person,” “whether her husband could come or not.” This Sunday she decided to travel down from SLC to St George where her mother lived just to apply for the in-person lottery again. On Wednesday, my last day, she was one of the lucky 10. (I’m not a real journalist or I would have realized I should have gotten her contact info to ask her what she thought of the hype after finally seeing it. I might not have gotten her number. She was suspicious of me being so nosy and didn’t want to give me her last name, concerned, I suppose, that I might be a reporter.)
I left Kanab after three days having not won four lotteries. The last day, I even applied for a nearby, lesser-known lottery-permitted area to the South with just 10 other applicants. One trip had six people. I lost that too. Instead, by cooling my heels and putting a few hundred miles in around greater-Kanab, I had some of the best desert hiking of my life, granted all were over an hour away, most over rough roads. In spite of the frigid nights, I was rewarded with mild day temperatures, dry slot canyons without the usual pools of dank water to wade through, and with the exception of the first mile or two in and out of Buckskin Gulch, only a handful of fellow hikers. I made a lot of notes on where to go when I return.
In the gym, on the road and hiking, I had plenty of time to contemplate how my 30-year long preference for serendipitous travel across the West was becoming a failing paradigm. My work-life is planned enough. More people than ever are now “out there” car-trekking like I did for years, or in an array of enviable, sometimes enormous RVs including some camper-vans worth considerably-more than my annual “executive” pay. There was a real diversity of people in race and age that impressed me, but there were also a lot of older travelers who looked as if living out of a vehicle might not be entirely by choice. I spoke with a few. That is a story for another day. Even on 100-mile long dirt roads there are a lot of people out there who, like me, clearly are not locals.
I should know better. Even without COVID, the visitation pressure on public lands was growing towards a carrying capacity. It is something that is just starting to be openly discussed. The White River National Forest where I live in Central Colorado is the most visited in the U.S. largely because of ski areas. It also becomes busy enough in summer months that access to Maroon Bells road is by shuttle bus only, as is the trailhead on Hanging Lake along I-70 in Glenwood Canyon. These require advanced tickets for access. Camp sites across Colorado this summer were a challenge whether in the front country or back country. Twice, I backpacked to a favorite lake 12-miles in and over 2,000’ in elevation up the Gore Range to find over 100 fellow backpackers around the lake. Forget anything near Moab. I’ve pushed my desert visits far into the shoulder seasons, camping in snow in late November or rainy weekends in February. The rest of the year, camping around Moab like I used to do on a whim, fuhgeddaboudit. Like my peers, I am pushing another hour or two further out from my usual haunts, and still finding plenty of company. COVID has driven some of the increasing numbers. People deprived of other distractions of social outlets, events, sports, are looking to their nearby public lands. It has accelerated a trend toward needing to plan far in advance to reserve space. It also has land managers talking about permits to trailheads near busy destinations like Vail and Breckenridge that are overwhelmed on a daily basis in the summer. They are often travelling on trails built in the 1930s by Civilian Conservation Corps which have been lightly maintained by under-funded land managers for years. The deterioration on many trails in recent years is notable. That can be fixed with money. The demand/impact issue, the market certainly could take care of that too with congestion pricing, but that does not meet the spirit of our public lands. I am trying to envision how a “Wave” permit system or in-person lottery might go over in my backyard. It has already happened on most Western Rivers, but for day hikers?
For the novelty of it, and learning the process, on break, far away in Kanab, I was just fine starting my hikes later in the mornings for the possibility of “winning” access to a natural wonder made recently famous far beyond a carrying capacity. It was a strangely comforting common experience with travelers during the very strange time of COVID.
When it comes to time off, by preference, I’m not a planner. Usually I despise waiting in line or in traffic. That’s why I moved to a small town 30 years ago. Like Huck Finn, when I get a chance, I want to “light out for the territories.” Yes, it is a romantic fantasy. I am hardly alone in that impulse. Certainly on weekends, whether I am considering taking out the raft, getting on a bike or taking my boots and trekking poles to a trailhead, I don’t often want to plan until the day-of or day-before. I’m learning instead, that I may have to become less like Huck on break, and more like the meticulous project manager I have been at work. It pains me that there it is starting to look like that may be the case for some trails if trailheads continue to be this overwhelmed.
Reflecting back on my hours in the gym in Kanab, the murals and the neon signs outside may still proclaim this “Cowboy Country,” but I’ve seen the future of public access in Kanab, and it looks a lot more like circling for parking and then waiting in line the way urban folks have grown accustomed to at a Starbucks than it does the romantic life of a wandering cowboy on the open range.
I’ll be going back to Kanab, but for you, I don’t recommend it.
