Sedona: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

We arrived in Sedona on Monday, April 10th, and promptly met up with our friend Wayne. He’s an old friend of Michael’s – they used to work together at the Fort Collins REI. Wayne now lives in Prescott and came out to show us the best of Sedona’s mountain biking.

We headed over to Sedona’s west side and parked near the Long Canyon trailhead. I say near, because the parking lot was completely full. On a Monday. Who were all these people? Luckily for us, Taco Negro is a high-clearance, 4WD vehicle. And at the end of the paved road at Long Canyon trailhead… was a high-clearance, 4WD road. We found a place to park in about 30 seconds.

Sedona mountain biking is pretty heavenly. I don’t know how else to describe that sweet, flowy singletrack.

There weren’t any steep grades on our entire 13-mile ride. I had a great time – although it was a tough ride for me. I haven’t been on my bike since February, and that was an hour-long ride in Florida. So the first hour of our Sedona ride was fun. The second was tough. And the third… was pretty brutal. I mean, I’m always happy to see Taco Negro, but today she was an especially wonderful sight.

Mostly for this view:

And even though that paved parking lot was full, we really didn’t run in to that many people on the trail. Everyone was pretty friendly, too. And my new wheelset performed admirably.

Wayne ended up taking us out to dinner and then camping with us, out on a Forest Service road south of town. He’s an overlander, like us, and has a nice setup in the back of his truck. The next morning we fueled up on coffee and oatmeal, and then Wayne said, “let’s ride east Sedona today!”

Michael was all for it, but I didn’t think my sit bones (or my lady parts) could handle another three hours in the saddle. I begged off. Michael and Wayne headed out in Wayne’s truck, and I went over to the Sedona public library. I worked on the blog and researched places to to laundry, as well as places to take a shower. Sedona seemed to have neither. No laundromat? Where do all the poor people go? I expanded my search and found Cottonwood, about 15 miles away.

My skipping the ride turned out to be a good thing. The boys started out at the Bell Rock trailhead. I can’t remember the names of all the trails they rode but they started out on a trail called Slim Shady. Michael said that the ride was pretty technical. He and Wayne had a blast, but both agreed that I might not have enjoyed it as much.

We bid Wayne a fond farewell and agreed to come see him in Prescott next, and then camped back out on that Forest Service road. For all the tourists and riders we saw in Sedona, the dispersed camping was practically empty. Guess Sedona isn’t a big dirtbag destination.

The next day we headed over to Cottonwood – and found everything we needed. Like a laundromat, a Walmart, and a rec center. This is where the real people live, because Sedona is completely full of tourists.

Of course, we consider ourselves travelers, not tourists, and we weren’t done with Sedona yet. The next day we went back to the Bell Rock trailhead… for a trail run. Michael said Slim Shady trail was technical – so it sounded perfect for a run. We ran Slim Shady and part of Hiline as an out-and-back, about 5 miles altogether. We had another wildlife sighting! Again, no pictures, and I’m sorry about that. But this one happened pretty fast. It was pretty early on in the run and I was ahead of Michael. I heard something crashing through the bushes off to my right. Since I was new to this trail, I didn’t know what direction it went off in, so at first I thought it was a mountain biker who wiped out or something. But the sound kept getting closer, and it was pretty low to the ground. Then, as it got closer to the trail behind me, I realized it looked like a small feral pig. It was a javelina! According to the Arizona Game & Fish Department, javelina are not pigs, but are “actually members of the peccary family, a group of hoofed mammals originating from South America.”

We were first warned about javelina back in New Mexico, where a helpful National Parks employee told us about them. Apparently they generally try to avoid humans. However, they have really bad eyesight so their escape path may take them directly into the path of a human.

So when I saw the javelina headed toward the trail right as Michael came around a turn, I hollered at him to stop. But I was just a second too late. That little not-pig shot across the trail inches in front of Michael, scaring the crap out of him. Luckily the javelina kept going. And when we heard a second javelina coming up the hillside, we both got the hell out of the way in plenty of time.

Whew! We didn’t see any more wildlife on the run, but the views were spectacular.

It was amazing.

Hell, trails like this are why I run.

After we got back to the truck we had ourselves a tailgate lunch and I took some pictures with my good camera.

So yeah, even though Sedona is full of tourists… man, it is just gorgeous here.

After our trail run we decided to camp on the east side of Sedona. We’d heard about a Jeep trail called Schnebly Hill Road, which leads to the section of Coconino National Forest that lies between Sedona and I-17.

Too bad this picture doesn’t really show how rough this road is. The drive took over an hour and I basically had my little baggie of candied ginger in my hand the whole time. This was the roughest road I’ve ever been on. The odd thing is that Michael never even put the truck into 4WD. This is partly because the grade wasn’t that steep, and partly because we have such awesome tires on the rig.

Once we got to the top we were greeted with Schnebly Hill Vista. It was the wrong time of day for a photograph like this, but I did the best I could.

You can camp for free anywhere between the vista point and I-17. It didn’t take us too long to find a campsite that was out of the wind and completely deserted. We didn’t see a soul until we drove out the next day. Life around Sedona was pretty damn good.