WHITE POCKET + BABY

Part 12 in a series about exploring the American West in an RV with an 8 week old baby

By Tommy Nagle

April 27^th, 2020

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If you're visiting the region of northern Arizona / southern Utah with the intention of taking in 'the nature', then you can do a lot worse than The Wave, dramatic rock formations formed over millions of years by windblown sand.

“It's like a hurricane, freeze framed”

- Utah.com

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The Wave became so popular that the Bureau of Land Management had to restrict the number of visitors to protect the area. The BLM office in Kanab, Utah (yes, even though the Wave is in Arizona) limits numbers to 20 visitors per day, via two lottery systems.

If you're planning your trip in advance, you can apply online for one or more of ten daily permits through a lottery that's run three months in advance of the permit entry date. I don't blame you if you have to read that sentence again. A daily lottery awards 10 remaining spots, valid for next-day trips. More info here.

More than 160,000 people applied to visit The Wave in 2017, and only a few thousand got their wish. This is how busy the room was at the aforementioned BLM office on the morning I went to apply. Not pictured are the people lined up against the walls. Needless to say, we didn't get permits. Sad face.

But, like all good boy scouts, girl scouts, and data managers, we had a backup:

Unlike The Wave, you can't hike directly to White Pocket, you have to drive in. And you can't do so in anything less than a 4x4, because the roads to get there aren't actually roads. They're sandy, rocky tracks that will eat your Nissan Altima alive.

We didn't have a 4x4. We had an RV. So off to the car rental place we went, Xpress Rent-A-Car Of Kanab, who have a couple of vintage well-used classic Jeep 4x4's, specifically for going out adventuring in the sand.

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On our way to White Pocket, we had to drive east, over the mountains, through the trees, and back down toward the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument.

We drove across a smokey landscape, controlled forest burns going on all around.

And then, just like that, we were driving on sand.

I hadn't driven a 4x4 in sand quite as deep as this.

Actually, I hadn't driven a 4x4 in sand before.

Wait, I don't think I'd even driven a 4x4 before.

I'd be lying if there wasn't the occasional moment where I feared we were stuck. But the old Jeep was actually very capable, and it was a fun experience, picking lines through the sand and negotiating rock minefields.

wo and three quarter hours after leaving Kanab, the road, such as it was, terminated at a small parking area, where two or three cars already resided. We weren't that surprised to see other people there, but as we got out into the rocks, we saw that our company was in fact a film crew.

We didn't want to disturb them as they worked, so didn't ask what they were filming. But they did get out a drone at one stage. If anyone can be bothered to find out what they were filming, answers on a postcard please.

So we walked, with no particular destination other than where our curiosity took us.

“There are some good things to be said about walking... Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details.”

- Edward Abbey

One could punctuate a story about White Pocket with all sorts of adjectives.

Surreal.

Otherworldly.

Alien.

But perhaps it's best to just let the photographs do the talking.

I missed a trick not setting up MoodyFamilyPortraitPanoramas.com

Then again I could sell some black and white photos you'd find on a cheap calendar.

When we'd had enough of the rocks at White Pocket, we stopped off at the nearby Paw Hole, where more rock formations were bathing in the evening sun.

As we left Paw Hole to go back to town, the smoke from the controlled burns was slowly enveloping the landscape:

We got back to the rental car place at almost eight o'clock, and since we were low on food, we treated ourselves made do with something resembling a pizza from Kanab's Pizza Hut in the comfortable surroundings of the Kanab RV Corral.