Sedona, AZ
2022 Parks Road Trip Diary: Days 73-77
You only need to drive into Sedona and immediately see the 360-degree red, green, and blue to understand why it is such a popular destination for nature tourism. It’s not a national park, but its trails are well maintained and their quality easily rivals that of any park in the US. Having the city of Sedona and all its conveniences right smack in the middle of it all makes it feel like the desert version of Banff or Estes Park.
Day 73 (night): Beating the Labor Day Rush
Besides the heat, another reason to leave Joshua Tree after only one full day there was that Labor Day weekend was coming up. Sedona was definitely going to get busy, and we needed to snag a FCFS (first-come-first-serve) campsite. We were banking on this being possible on the Thursday night before the weekend.
We just barely got a site (at Cave Springs campground). Their FCFS system was confusing because they opaquely mixed it with their normal advance reservation system. The lack of transparency was frustrating, and led to some minor mishaps for us that I won’t get into. It seemed to me like some of the park staff secretly enjoyed wielding their power over hopeful campers like us. My attitude might be shaded by seeing one of them flying a confederate flag from their trailer… (Really? In Arizona?)
Er, anyway, moving on. The rest of Sedona was pretty great.
Day 74: Getting our Vortex on
Again worried about the impending Labor Day crowds, we decided that we’d use today, Friday, to do the more popular hikes in Sedona. Though we were just guessing at what was popular based on AllTrails. First up: Cathedral Rock.
Cathedral Rock
The climb is to the base of the cathedral, not the very top. Once there, it felt humbling to stand against the towering walls.
Sedona also supposedly has these natural phenomena called “vortexes” which are locations thought to be swirling centers of spiritual energy. People have agreed that visiting these locations makes them feel rejuvenated and uplifted. A rationalist would reject this, since the claim isn’t falsifiable – there’s no repeatable experiment you can run to detect it. They might ultimately clash with the spiritualists over whether science is really applicable to the human subjective experience. All this is to nicely say: I was curious, but went in with zero expectations.
There are apparently three major vortexes in Sedona, and Cathedral Rock had one of them located at this rock pillar a little off to the side of the base of the cathedral. Here’s us standing next to it:
Final report: I… can’t say I felt anything. But maybe this just means I need to get more in tune with nature. 🤨
Anyway, coming back down was fun too. With the vegetation being short here, there were views pretty much the entire way. Though that also meant almost no shade, and it was hot out.
After, we decided to explore some of the nearby trails, since going up and down Cathedral Rock was so quick: just 1.2 miles. We made our way along the Easy Breezy trail (warning: not as breezy as advertised) over to the Little Horse Trailhead area and clocked a total of 4 mi, 1100 ft elev. gain before we took the Sedona shuttle back to where we parked.
Boynton Canyon / Subway Trail
It was barely past noon at this point, so it was time for hike #2 of the day: Boynton Canyon Trail (6.1 mi, 800 ft elev. gain) with the additional offshoots to the Boynton Vortex and Boynton Subway (+2.1 mi, +500 ft elev gain).
These two offshoots were really the main attractions of the trail. The trail’s actual endpoint was at a nondescript spot deep into the canyon where going farther would have required cutting a path into the rising canyon walls.
The first offshoot was the second of the three major Sedona vortex spots: Boynton Vortex. It was important we visit this, because what if vortexes can change like the weather and we just happened to go to Cathedral Rock on a weak vortex day there, you know? We had to do our due diligence.
Again the vortex coincided with a small peak in the red rock formations. This time I climbed it and sat directly on it. Sadly, still nothing to report.
Onward to the second offshoot: the “subway”. It’s a spot in the canyon where erosion over time created a really cool formation to climb up onto. You have to do a small scramble up a pretty steep portion of trail to get up here.
How beautiful! I could’ve sat here for a while. But unfortunately at this point we had a 4 mile return trip and would be racing against sunset, so it was time to head back.
I didn’t mention it earlier, but this was the second night in a row now that we’d eaten dinner out at a restaurant despite being perfectly able to cook for ourselves back at camp. Through all of Sedona, the only cooking we’d end up doing would be tomorrow night, and that’s just because food we already had would’ve otherwise spoiled.
It may not look like it from the pictures, but between the last five days of Southwest US summer heat and having been on the road for the last 70+ days, we were definitely getting worn down.
Day 75: Devil’s Bridge
Today we decided to do what might actually be the most popular trail in the park: Devil’s Bridge (4.1 mi, 500 ft elev gain). It’s a place not to be missed when hiking in Sedona because it’s a natural arch that you can stand on. Combined with the always-beautiful red, green, and blue vistas of Sedona behind it, it is the perfect picture-taking spot. And with a two mile hike to get there, it at least feels a little bit like you have to earn it.
Before we get to the bridge, first some appreciation for the flora of the area. Sedona definitely has that deserty feel but still has so much diversity in what naturally grows there.
Once we reached the bridge, we were reminded that it was very much labor day weekend. If we wanted a picture there, it would have been quite a wait:
What a slow process it was. First there’s the effort of coordinating with whoever is taking your photo from the other side, then of course everyone has to do multiple poses, not to mention the walk out to the bridge and back takes some time too. With over 20 people in line, my guess is we’d have been waiting for an hour.
It just felt wrong that the picture would convey that I was living my best life in this amazing spot in the solitude of the Sedona wilderness, when in reality I would have been standing for ages suffering in the heat and feeling grumpy about the effects of social media on society.
The Devil’s Bridge hike was brief so we chose one of a similar length to fill the rest of the day: Soldier Pass (4.5 mi, 800 ft elev. gain).
You can’t park at the trailhead, so we drove to the nearest parking lot where there was a free shuttle that would take you there. We were bummed to find out that the next shuttle wasn’t coming for a little while (~30 mins). After a few minutes of sitting outside in the 12PM heat waiting, we both started to think: “is this actually going to be fun”? While it was cooler here than in Death Valley and Joshua Tree, it was still in the low 90s.
We decided we’d had enough and just scrapped this plan entirely. The alternative: sit in a Starbucks the rest of the afternoon!
It’s lame, but that’s the point we were at. The hikes of the last few days weren’t even that tiring, but the heat saps you in a different, worse way. After a few hours here, we headed back to camp to cook dinner and have a relaxing rest of the night.
Day 76: Very Prickly Pears
With our final planned day in Sedona, I lobbied for us to do one hike that was actually a challenging climb: Bear Mountain (4.9 mi, 2000 ft elev. gain). I felt like it had been ages since we scaled a peak that we could be proud of. It’s still nowhere close to the hardest we’ve done on this trip, but we weren’t going to push it in this heat.
This trail had a lot of scrambling here and there. It was pretty easy to lose the trail, so you had to look out for the white arrows painted on the rocks (seen below).
Once you reach the second half of the ascent, when the red rocks turn to tan ones, the views start to open up. It was awesome!
One thing that made this trail memorable was that it had four false summits on the way up. False summits mess with your mental fortitude; you might think, “I’m almost at the end!” when you’re actually just hitting a false summit and need to keep going. We really were repeatedly tricked, but it was actually more funny than exasperating.
The real summit offers a truly amazing view. Sedona is already lovely in every direction so I guess it’s no surprise that it gets even better the higher up you go. Because of the relative difficulty of the trail, it was pretty secluded up here too – we saw just one or two other couples.
On the way back, we were reminded of the harshness of desert life. As I was sitting at the peak, some fire ants crawled on me, and one of them bit! It was painful and numb, like a weak bee sting. Separately, Judy accidentally kicked a prickly pear cactus which left 10-20 needles in her ankle that we had to stop and pull out. That was quite a shock – she definitely had it worse than me.
Anyway, we had recovered, at least mentally, by the time we reached the trailhead again. With this as our last day in Sedona, we really needed a shower before the long drive tomorrow. At first we struggled to find public showers in the area, but eventually found a Reddit post mentioning that the Sedona Community Pool has cheap admission and gives you access to the pool showers. It ended up being perfect – not only did we get showers but we spent the rest of the hot day at the pool!
It was a nice way to cap off the end of Sedona before starting a series of long drives back towards Texas.
post originally written 1/1, backdated to match reality