The red rock of Sedona

A whirlwind Christmas trip to the snowbird home of Mom and Doug included a drive up to Sedona.  Up to the red rock country that was homeland of the Apache and Yavapai until 1876 when those vanquished peoples were force marched, mid-winter over 180 miles of desert country.  Hundreds died.

Bell rock

Some 10,000 people live there now.  Sedona has been a tourist destination for 5 or 6 decades and modern-day retirees came to settle there in the 80s and 90s.

But the vivid strata delineated on the sandstone cliffs provide evidence that even the first humans, those who came to hunt the mammoths and camels and the giant sloths some 15000 years ago, were but johnny-come-latelys.

Some hold that this country is a center for vortices of spiritual energy revealed in the way the juniper trees reach up from the dry earth.  Creosote, mesquite, and broom speckle the desert floor where black bear, cotton-tail rabbits, and even the vanishing mountain lions still roam.

The sights we have seen, together...

It is a haunted land.  But the spirits are not human.  They're older than that.  They rest in their rocky strata, recalling ages past when the land was shaped by molten lava, or lay under ancient seas.  The spirits call out yet, echoing a past that was lost long before the first men ventured here from their far-away savannahs.