About this permit
The Coyote Buttes North Daily Lottery is the second of the two ways to get a permit for The Wave, and the only one that works on short notice. BLM awards 16 people and up to 4 groups a day through it, two days ahead of the hike date, to applicants who are physically inside a geofence covering roughly the Highway 89 and 389 corridors between Kanab and Page.
Everything happens on a mobile device: you apply between 6 AM and 6 PM, results land at 7:15 PM, and winners accept and pay by 8 AM the next morning before an in-person safety briefing at 8:30. Miss any of those and the permit is void. Recreation.gov permit 4251909 is the only place this lottery runs.
The route
The permit is the hard part; the walk is not. From the Wire Pass trailhead on House Rock Valley Road the suggested route runs about 6.4 miles round trip across open sand and slickrock with no trail, no cairns and few signs. BLM's briefing exists because people get lost on it every year.
The route climbs gently across benches, crosses a saddle, and drops toward the twin troughs of the Wave itself. Everything before it looks like everything else, which is why the briefing hands out a route description and why a downloaded GPS track matters more here than a map.
Why it matters
The Advanced Lottery is the one everyone knows and the one everyone loses. This is the other quarter of the quota, and it is the only Wave permit a traveller who is already in Kanab can still get. BLM built it around a geofence precisely so the people applying are the people who can actually show up the day after tomorrow.
The feeling
You spend a normal day (Zion, Antelope Canyon, a long lunch in Page) with a phone in your pocket that has already been used once at 6 AM. At 7:15 PM the email arrives. If it is the good one, tomorrow morning stops being yours: you are at a visitor centre desk at 8:30 for a briefing about heat, sand and unmarked ground, and the day after that you are standing on the striped sandstone everyone has seen a photograph of.
