Sedona - Oak Creek Canyon

4/5/09
Sedona was as beautiful and crowded as its reputation promised. The beauty was somewhat undermined when I was there, and the congestion exacerbated, by an enormous road construction project that turned half the downtown thoroughfare, the half with the art galleries as it happened, into a nerve-rattling gauntlet of narrow lanes, no shoulders, traffic cones, blockades, dust, construction workers and backhoes, not to mention befuddled tourists, myself included.

The businesses were all open, desperately trying to rope in customers, adding the entering and exiting of brave or foolhardy shoppers to the confusion. I was too busy gripping the steering wheel trying to see where I was supposed to turn while avoiding pedestrians and other befuddled drivers, so no art galleries for me in Sedona.

Which was fine, as the surrounding landscape provided all the art I needed. Red Rock Country, it is called, and while red is well represented, most of the nicely carved mesas, cliff, mountains, and buttes are more of an orange, combined with the creamiest of beige, a combination strongly reminiscent of orange creamsicles, one of my most favorite childhood summertime treats. This got me to wondering whether they still exist, showing how much time I spend in the ice cream aisle nowadays, but a certified young person I met (from Seattle, no less) confirmed not only that they did still exist but that they always would. Ah, youth! The rich green from the juniper and pinon pine forest on the lower slopes and the lusty blue skies overhead whip the whole schema into shape. Again, Sedona does deserve its reputation for beauty.

But it’s a strange case: a National Park-quality environment with a small city in the middle, a tourist city with an outdoor feel but not exclusive to outdoor recreationists. One can just enjoy the beauty from behind a cold one at one of the outdoor cafes after touring the shops, and many do. Even where there is no construction the town center is very congested. While most of the town is privately owned, featuring very upscale residential and commercial development, the US Forest Service has a good hold on the perimeter and provides lots of hikes. The trailheads tend to be located down fancy residential streets, with parking regulations far stricter than conventional Forest Service trailheads. The balancing act must be daunting. As is taking pictures of these extraordinary views without power lines running through them.

I headed up Oak Creek Canyon north of the town and grabbed an open site at Bootlegger campground, a tiny site along the road with no water for $18, possibly the worst campground value I’d ever had. (Bootlegger has since been converted to day use only). Obviously I was paying for location, a fact I reinforced by pitching my tent and fleeing for the day.

My first hike was in Boynton Canyon, which I chose mostly for the photo in the Mountaineers 100 Hikes in Arizona book. I somehow missed the bit about the first part of the hike running alongside a luxury resort, one with ongoing construction work the day I was there. The trail itself was actually in a wilderness area, making for the noisiest wilderness area ever. A barbed wire fence marking the forest service boundary directly abutted a wrought iron fence denoting private property, and at one point I was looking right down onto a condo roof, an iron parapet discouraging me from descending to kidnap an heiress, closed-circuit cameras positioned to capture anyone foolish enough to try. On the upside the construction did reflect cliff-dwelling architecture and fit in rather nicely. The landscaping not so much.

The trail passed through thin woods along a dry creek before emerging on to open rock and a fine set of climactic views. Some easy rock scaling took me to even better views, and lunch. The hike was not very demanding so later in the afternoon I took on the A.B. Young Trail, climbing two miles and 2000 feet elevation up the canyon wall straight out of my campground. Despite a hazy afternoon sun it was a fine place to see Oak Creek cutting its canyon out of the Mogollon Rim. It also allowed my first peek at the San Francisco Peaks, Arizona's highest mountains, still covered in snow. I yearned to explore them but that would have to wait a couple of months.

Atop the A.B. Young Trail was the East Pocket Lookout Tower, a sign at the bottom saying visitors welcome, two at a time. I climbed up three flights of stairs and found the gate locked. A small sign was posted upside down on the bottom of the top stair presumably with instructions for opening the lock, but in order to read it I would have had to raise my head face up under the stair and still need to read it upside down, like kissing the damn Blarney Stone. I didn’t really care about being on top of the lookout tower.

Back at the campground things had improved dramatically. Four women had taken the site on one side of me, two women claimed the site on the other side of me, four more took the spot across the road from me, and a car came in late at night with two more women to claim the site next to them. That made twelve women, not a man among them, in the four sites closest to mine. Odds like that and a boy could get himself kissed. Alas I was no longer a boy and pleased enough that Melissa and Tracy from the next site invited me over to their fire. They were from the greater Seattle area. Melissa lived in Duvall and frequented Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. Tracy lived 15 blocks away from my apartment in Ravenna and patronized Ravenna Third Place.

It also turned out that Melissa's aunt was the campground host at Saddlebag Campground outside Yosemite whom I had chatted with about the tribulations of working a campground that had been touted as California's best by some travel magazine. Melissa had also been there the previous summer and she and I have a laugh over her aunt’s stress level at this too-popular campground. The two young women were nice and I had a good time, though I had trouble finding my words, it having been some time since I'd been in a social situation. I pulled myself away after an hour or so to avoide making a nuisance of myself.

Bootlegger Campground sat at a cold 5000 feet, tucked deeply in the narrow canyon that did not see the sun for a couple of hours after sunrise. No place to linger so I headed out early to the world-famous West Fork Trail, another notorious mob scene that I had it nearly to myself thanks to my early start. A family of three trailing somewhat behind me were the only people I saw all morning. The trail was delightful with a plethora of stream crossings which I was able to negotiate and stay almost completely dry. There were even some lingering snow patches where the trail dwindled into the creek at its rather spectacular end point. On my way out I saw plenty of people, including Tracy and Melissa, in flip-flops! I could kick myself for not taking their picture.

I didn’t want to keep paying $18 a night to camp in the cold so I relocated about 15-miles to 3300 foot Deadhorse Ranch State Park, where the tent sites were spare, sandy, and surrounded by creosote. I spent the day at the other end of the park, in a lush picnic area alongside the Verde River, one of the desert’s last free-flowing rivers. The park is part of a 35-mile stretch known as the Verde River Greenway, one of the last stands for the Fremont Cottonwood. As the wind grew formidable through the day, I hunkered down behind a tree to eat my lunch and saw ants blowing across the sidewalk. That was new.

I set out to hike something called the marsh trail but never got there. I had read that the trail was ¾ mile long but missed the fact that it began 1.5 miles from the trailhead. I ended up in a partially abandoned pasture with lots of downed cottonwoods, roaring out what words I knew to “Helter Skelter” in the teeth of the howling wind. When I got back to the campground I found I was the only tent camper left; the two other parties fleeing when they found their tents shredded. Mine was intact but the inside was covered with an inch of gritty red sand, another new one. The wind was still raising clouds of red dust inside my tent so I took to my car, the first time in months that weather drove me to the discomforts of my sub-compact shelter.

I commuted to Sedona for a few more hikes. The Wilson Mountain Trail had great views early on but the splendor diminished after the first couple of miles. Mogollon Rim and San Francisco Peaks looked fine in the distance but Wilson Mountain itself had suffered a lot of fire damage, great for the long-term health of the forest I know, but being a single organism myself, I find it dispiriting.

I was also getting frustrated that my hikes were not getting me to places that matched the views available from the main roads. I had to start puzzling out the elaborate neighborhood trail system and its restrictive parking access. I picked one that sounded good but found a trailhead with only twelve parking spaces, all filled but the handicapped space, overflow parking strictly prohibited. So back into Saturday traffic, retreating to Oak Creek to wait out the midday heat reading in dappled sunlight, accumulating the gumption to go back out and take on Sedona's streets.

At my next trailhead I met some people who had been in town for three weeks and had begun to figure things out. They told me of a trailhead with more spacious parking that had a one mile connector trail to the trail I had wanted to do. And from there, the Jordan Trailhead, I finally nailed it: a four-hour delight ending in late afternoon light leaving me feeling that I had achieved a valuable Sedona thing. I could have stayed longer and figured the whole place out but I figured there was a lot of red rock out there with far fewer complications. So I called it a week for Sedona. On to Zion!