Trip to Sedona (Part II)

Exhausted from the trip to the Heard Museum, I decided to ride the metro back to the hotel and walk one block to shade and temperature safety. But my husband wanted to go back to the Heard Museum and eat a late lunch in the Museum Café. We took the metro once again and then walked all the way to the museum in even hotter temperatures. But the Café had delicious food and it was worth the trip. We walked through the outdoor gardens a bit and returned to the hotel.

Early next day, our Uber driver took us to a hotel on the other side of downtown Phoenix where we were taking the Detours company van to Sedona, with 10 other people. They turned out to be wonderful travel companions, some single, some couples.

The Uber driver, a lovely man hailing from Guadalajara, Mexico, who had been in this country for 50 years, serenaded us, unexpectedly, with a surprising song, Che sera, sera, which happens to be our favorite song. How he knew about it, I had no idea. We were both surprised.

Stan, our tour driver, and guide greeted us, and, after picking up other people, he drove to Scottsdale which turned out to be quite a sleepy town given the early hour in the morning. We picked up the last couple at the Marriott resort, fancy coffees and off we went.

We drove by many varieties of short cacti in bloom, including the infamous teddy bear (because spines look so fine) or cholla (pronounced Choya) cactus, and a few fields of Pima cotton. The Pima Indian tribe grows large fields of this cotton. The long-fiber Pima cotton grows as a small tree with bright yellow flowers. The cotton is superior because it does not pill like short-fiber cotton. The long fibers of the Pima cotton make any clothing last for years.

The landscape was desert sand and brush, wildflowers now and then and plenty of cacti, first small and then larger and larger Saguaros. A lone frame house, trailer, or RV would appear far from the road, not attached to any electricity or running water. There were powerlines close to the road, but nobody was connected to it. Water cisterns with the emblem “potable water” passed us by or were visible in the distance between the isolated homes. Nobody in the group could understand why people chose to live so far from civilization and so primitively. There were no solar panels anywhere nor wind turbines. Talk about the massive work of conserving whatever water people bought and stored from the traveling tankers with potable water!

The landscape changed to heavy and huge concentrations of Saguaro cactus mixed in with juniper trees and eventually huge ponderosa pine forests. When that happened, the Saguaro cacti disappeared – they cannot grow beyond 2,000 feet elevation due to colder temperatures. Any kind of frost destroys its arms, and the Saguaro plant eventually dies.

The first stop was the Montezuma Castle National Monument in Camp Verde, Arizona. The rock formations and carvings had nothing to do with the Aztecs or Montezuma and such connections were not proven. Presumably naturally occurring caves were eroded by water into the soft limestone or built by its inhabitants, the Sinagua people (1100 A.D. – 1425 A.D.), a pre-Columbian culture closely related to the Hohokam and other indigenous people of the southwestern United States. Nobody knows what caused the culture to disappear or if they moved themselves elsewhere when the water source ran out or became foul. The five stories structure contains about 20 rooms and the entrances look like caves.

The day was gorgeous, sunny, and breezy, the temperatures were milder, in the seventies. We were on alert for snakes (Arizona has six types of poisonous rattle snakes). Luckily only one juvenile was spotted by a group member. We were told that native tribes return to the area for religious ceremonies annually.

As we climbed higher and higher, the landscape resembled Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, with steep gorges, beautiful forests, and dizzying drops and gulleys.

From the Village of Oak Creek, heading north on highway 179, we came upon the Bell Rock Boulevard with its towering red rocks in the distance.

Bell Rock is a butte south of Sedona in Yavapai County with an elevation of 4,919 feet. To its east is the Courthouse Butte. Legend says that criminals were judged and executed at the foot of the Courthouse Butte, hence the name.

To reach the summit of the Bell Rock, an unmarked and challenging trail must be followed. The easier trail reaches a small plateau on the northwest face.

Sedona is said to have gained its New Age community in 1987 when hundreds of devotees gathered to watch the top of the rock which was supposed to crack open and allow a spacecraft to fly out. When that did not happen, and no little Martians made their appearance, nobody left disappointed. The legend continues to this day and the new date was set for 4044.

As we climbed to higher elevations to reach Sedona, at 4,350 feet, we stopped at the magnificent Chapel of the Holy Cross, surrounded by red rock buttes. The Roman Catholic Chapel was completed in 1956 and was built into the red rock within the Coconino National Forest. A wealthy local rancher, inspired by the Empire State Building, commissioned this chapel carved into stone. It has since become the most visited point in the area.

Climbing to the top, it was an awe-inspiring experience for me not only because the surrounding rocks and landscape were breathtaking and you could see so far away across the land from the top, but because I wanted to light three candles in the memories of my mother, my mother-in-law, and my dad, and I wanted to pray. I do not know if it was the mountain desert heat and the intense sun, or the solemnity of the moment, but I felt light-headed and had a slight vertigo looking into the chasm below.

Sedona revealed itself like a precious desert flower, colorful, artsy, hippy, in a crystal vortex of shops and restaurants, art galleries, and green gullies overlooking more red rocks like giants made of intricate and broken bricks peppered with juniper trees in the inimitable green of the waxy desert leaves. Unusual cacti decorated spaces with intense yellow, red, and fuchsia flowers, interspersed with hippy art.

                                                      Sedona seen from its highest point

 

TO BE CONTINUED