Once the crowds at the BLM office dispersed, I knew I had to hurry. I didn't want to get caught plodding through the desert in the midday heat. The temperatures in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness can shoot from hot to infernal in a few short hours. Even lizards start looking for cover around noon.

Even though I had a well-marked map with color photos to guide me, I didn't want to take a chance on getting lost. So I hired a guide.

In a tie-dyed shirt, blond ponytail, blue jeans and heavy work boots, Steve Dodson looked more like a 51-year-old Woodstock roadie than an outdoor guide. I met him at his restaurant, the Paria Outpost, about half a mile from the BLM field office near Big Water, Utah. When he's not slicing up barbecue at his eatery, he's leading tourists into the desert. He's been doing this for more than 10 years.

We sped down a washboard road in his clattering red Suzuki Trooper, gravel and dirt spewing in our wake. He braked in a cloud of dust at the Wire Pass trail head, a gravel parking lot about eight miles south of U.S. 89.

From here, we began a three-mile trek across a rust-colored, nearly shadeless desert. The BLM suggests hikers carry at least a gallon of water for the trek; I brought a little more than that and wished I had more. We started at 10 a.m. and already I felt the fabric of my shirt melting on my back.

Our hike followed a dry wash for about half a mile before it cut through red sand dunes. Dodson told me he couldn't remember how many times he'd been to the Wave. He assured me that the photos don't do it justice. As a professional guide, he doesn't have to mess with the BLM lottery, but he supports the permit limits, even though they tend to stifle his business.

"The wildlife experience is greatly enhanced with seclusion," he said. "That's why I like this area better than any other place." Dodson seemed like a bright guy, but I was still skeptical. Could the Wave really be worth this trouble?

As we hiked, he listed half a dozen other strange and magical rock formations near the borders of Utah and Arizona, but the Wave, he told me, was different. So what makes it so special?

Talk to geologists and they'll use words like "diagenetic coloration" and "stratigraphic relationships" to explain its colors and stripes. They might dumb it down and tell you that the Wave is made of Jurassic-age Navajo sandstone -- 190-million-year-old sand dunes turned to rock. Stacked one atop another, the dunes calcified in vertical and horizontal layers.

Iron oxides bled through to give the sandstone a salmon color. Hematite and goethite added yellows, oranges, browns and purples. It was all underground until water seeped through a huge vertical crack in a ridge above. The water cut a channel that was then scoured over thousands of years by wind-blown sand, carving out smooth curves and swells that look like cresting ocean waves.

It sounded wild, but really, it's still just a big hunk of rock, right?

The farther Dodson led me toward the Wave, the more the landscape started to change. We marched through dry, flaking badlands, freckled with desert shrubs and an occasional juniper tree. We scrambled over red slickrock, scouting out our first landmark, a set of shapely buttes. We rested in the shade, watching a peregrine falcon hunt on the side of a red-and-beige mountain, etched with ridges that look like stretched muscles.

After a few minutes' rest, we headed south, looking to a tall, gray ridge on the horizon for a huge vertical crack that marked the entrance to the Wave.

ROCK CANDY

Close your eyes and imagine yourself walking into a humongous vat of cinnamon taffy. That's what went through my mind as we entered this weird, dreamlike world of swirling colors and psychedelic patterns. Maybe it was the desert heat, but it all looked like gooey taffy, stretched over huge mounds and 50-foot canyon walls. The surrounding buttes were heaps of melting rocky road ice cream.

The Wave is like an enormous Olympic-size swimming pool, with swooning, undulating walls lined with burnt sienna, pink, gray, turquoise and pale green. The bands mostly run horizontally, but at spots they zigzag and shimmy before falling back into their previous pattern.

It was nearly noon, and the temperature was pushing 100. A snow-cone vendor with a little pushcart would make a killing out here.

Voices echoed off the stone walls. Nearly all of the other 19 permit winners for that day milled around the multicolored canyon. A group of German tourists sat on a sandstone shelf, eating apples and taking photos. I asked how they had learned about this place, and one man muttered in a heavy German accent, "Internet . . . Google."

Just as Dodson was telling me that the Wave gets more visits from Europeans than Americans, along came Susie Shults from St. George, Utah, who had brought her boyfriend to see the stony wonderland. It took her only three tries at the lottery to win a permit.

When she first walked into the Wave, Shults said she imagined herself flying, swooping down along the rocky surface, soaking up the colored bands and banking off the undulating canyon walls. Shults stopped in her tracks and sprawled face down on the canyon floor, her arms stretched wide.

At first it seemed odd, and I had to remind myself that this woman was not in the grip of some form of dementia. But I understood what she was feeling. This place is a hallucination set in stone. I asked Dodson if any of his guests tried to enhance the visit with mind-altering drugs. "That would be overkill," he said.

Daniel Gradiska of New Zealand and Susie Shults of St. George, Utah, relax into the curves of the Wave. Only 20 people are allowed in to visit the area per day.
(Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)

A lizard is among the dwellers of the desert region near Page, Ariz.

The tadpole shrimp lives in the vernal pools of the wilderness area. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the shrimp is considered a living fossil because its basic body characteristics have remained the same for millions of years.

 
Among other residents of the area's vernal pools are tadpoles.

 
Tony Leonard of the Bureau of Land Management prepares hikers' applications for the daily lottery for permits to enter the Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness. Visitors can walk in for the daily lottery, or they can apply online.

Times staff writer Hugo Martín visited the Wave and described it this way: Close your eyes and imagine yourself walking into a humongous vat of cinnamon taffy. That's what went through my mind as we entered this weird, dreamlike world of swirling colors and psychedelic patterns. Maybe it was the desert heat, but it all looked like gooey taffy, stretched over huge mounds and 50-foot canyon walls.

Conical rock formations are a backdrop for desert wildflowers poking up through the stark terrain.

More photos (from the internet)