This summer, I’ve gotten really into watching people thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail. There’s a lot of interesting tics and behaviors that the thru-hiking community does. Some of it elicits that typical reflexive human scorn when you’re watching it – “Oh, no way I’d do _____ if I was out there hiking!” One of those behaviors is the obsessive love of getting into town so that you can eat at a restaurant. No way I’d be brought almost to tears by a McDonald’s burger, right?
And then I remember lunch at Fiesta Mexicana in Sedona on February 4. Which was after a 6-mile morning hike, not a 100-mile 5-day hike between towns. And then I realize that those people are completely justified in reacting the way they do.
I don’t say that to compare Fiesta Mexicana to McDonald’s directly. It’s your typical casual Mexican restaurant – big piles of rice and refried beans, enchiladas somewhere in between decent and really good – which is funny because I can’t think of a place where I’d less expect to find it than Sedona. We pigged out.
Our return flight from Phoenix to OKC wasn’t until late in the evening, which meant the whole afternoon was open. After some brief discussion and AllTrails review, the two of us settled on taking a visit over to Cathedral Rock on the south side of Sedona. Given that it was closer to midday on a Sunday, we figured traffic was going to end up being a total nightmare. That added a little bit of appeal to Cathedral Rock – it’s actually serviced by Sedona’s hiker shuttle.
With our stomachs and our gas tank pleasantly full (this car had an insane range on one tank, but we’d driven a not-insignificant chunk of the state of Arizona over the last several days), the two of us hopped into the downtown traffic circles and pulled into the AZ-179 Park and Ride lot. It wasn’t hard to conjure up some angst about waiting in line for hours, circling fruitlessly around the lot waiting for parking, or one of a million other things that could happen in such an overcrowded town. In reality, the parking lot was… filled, but not full. We found a spot on the first circle and saw the bus already waiting for us. I went on a dramatic, self-sacrificial run with my camera gear to make sure the bus held up to wait for Elizabeth, because I’m an amazing spouse. I boarded and asked the bus driver to wait a bit; she told me she would be waiting for 5 more minutes regardless of my heroism. Welp.
Cathedral Rock was the first and most popular stop on the shuttle route. The bus disgorged us and a lot of other little piggies at the trailhead, then loaded up on hikers who were finished and drove off to complete the loop. That left us with a short but sharp little hike to the summit of Cathedral Rock.
Where the Subway Cave trail has been crowded, this was more of a veritable madhouse. Even crazier was the fact that the trail opened up on a broad slope and basically turned into a free-for-all of slippery rock scrambling featuring people of all abilities trying to ascend and descend.
I could feel Elizabeth tense up beside me. Maybe it was the nerve-wracking experience of the Subway Cave earlier, or maybe it was the much higher proportion of the little piggies all around us here, or maybe it was just that we’d woken up so early on this day. But for whatever reason, her natural caution was enhanced just as we hit the slope and had to start clambering. In a way, this was good for me: redemption for my abject failure to climb as well as her earlier. But on the other hand, with each passing moment that a 50-year-old women slipped trying to drop down from a chest-high ledge, I realized that Elizabeth’s desire to complete this hike was dropping.
Look at the stress in her stance.
According to Google Maps, we actually made it much further up the trail than I expected. I didn’t know that at the time – we were navigating off of dead reckoning and the people filtering around us. What I do know is that the two of us stopped for a breather at a spot where the wide slope of Cathedral Rock gave way to a narrower, more well-defined “trail” that led up to the “summit” ledge. I was game to take it on, but the sound of people struggling their way up the ledge was enough to drive Elizabeth off. We stayed up there for about 5 minutes to catch our breath, enjoying a stunningly gorgeous February afternoon in Arizona.
And then we got the obligatory photos of ourself, and then we began the tortuous process of descending Cathedral Rock. Normally, coming down is a treat compared to going up, but not on this slippery-as-hell sandstone. The whole process took every bit as much time as going up had done.
The hiker shuttle was not waiting back at the trailhead, which gave me time to use the (abysmal) bathroom that was set up there. Elizabeth and I got ride all the way around the other side of the hiker shuttle, getting a chance to see some of the famed (and incredibly stupid) Vortexes of Sedona. It turns out that the water right below Cathedral Rock is one of them. Maybe that’s why my 2024 turned out the way it did – the Vortex has consumed me.
It was about 2:00 local time – too late in the afternoon to start anything new in Sedona, especially with a rather long drive ahead to get back to Phoenix for our evening flight. However, there was a national monument conveniently located just off of I-17 in between the two locations that might be worth a stop along the way back. We got into our rental car and got on AZ-179 southward toward Oak Creek. Once again, the drive was absolutely stunning right on through Oak Creek. From there, the road gradually began to funnel into a valley that was less of a red rock oasis and looked more like the rolling Arizona high desert we’d seen a lot of this weekend. Over on the far side of the shimmering valley, traffic rolled southward on 17. Our adventure in red rock country was officially done, but there was one more stop to be made before we left Arizona altogether.
