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Sedona, Arizona
Under your wheels the hope of spring, mirage of loss, a few more things
After leaving Phoenix (where I had work related business) and driving my ill equipped and rather unlucky rental car several hours up and over the central Arizona desert, I finally arrived in the promised land of Sedona. The town is remarkably well sited between some spectacular rock formations and contains some of the best, most rewarding quick day hikes that I have ever been lucky enough to experience. My relatively tight schedule kept me focused to just three or four of these hikes, although the promise of another 20 or 30 similarly qualified hikes creates as good a reason as any to imagine I'll find my way back there before too long.
The pictures start inside my unusually fine bed and breakfast. I booked with relatively late notice during the unpopular (and severely discounted) off season and found myself inside the well themed "Lonesome Dove" villa, complete with a fireplace, guitar, saloon doors and a bread maker that created great smelling but just about inedible bread.
This is the northern shoulder of Bell Rock, the site of one of the four (or six or more) energy vortices that some popular New Age guy made up, er, I mean discovered way back in the 1950s. The very popular Bell Rock vortex is supposed to emit electricity and is considered masculine, creating emotional, spiritual and physical energy (don't ask me, I'm just letting you know what was written in all of the trail books). And while I may have stood in this vortex I am sadly still not a believer, unlike this group of chanting New Agers who seemed slightly out of place on a hiking trail that early on a sunny Saturday morning.
Built by a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright (his Taliesin West down in Scottsdale isn't all that far away), the Chapel of the Holy Cross is a big time Sedona tourist attraction but also a victim of its own success- as of now just about all services had to be moved to a more boring, less spectacularly sited church due to dangerous overcrowding and a parking lot that is (at best) sub-par. The chapel is located just past an all dryvit residential zone, high on a ridge overlooking the valley and is optimized for the view of the chapel versus the view from the chapel. Sure the twisting, curvy concrete ramp up to the front doors has its moments, but the sad truth is that the building viewed from the road below beats the hell out of the actual experience inside the chapel.
The hardest and best of the three day hikes I took on my first day in Sedona was the Cathedral Rock Trail. Starting off a red dirt road (where lots of angry residents don't want you to park or drive anywhere near their property), the often well marked trail snakes along a riverbed before steeply climbing up smooth red rock to an amazing little ridge. Right before the big ascent the trail joins up with a far more popular (but far less dramatic) access trail that brings along with it lots of crowds and hard to miss rock cairns (like the one on the lower right in the picture below).
Cathedral Rock's popular summit is the site of another popular vortex, this one magnetic/feminine and one that was supposed to facilitate relaxation, a feeling that few really seem to share after such a steep, sweaty, generally arduous and totally exposed climb.
