Sedona - 2009

Sedona, AZ  February 2009

 

After our successful (?) inaugural trip in the fall of 2008 to New Hampshire to hike the Appalachian Trail Presidentials, our group decided to do some backpacking at Sedona before attending a church gathering in Phoenix.  To protect their identity, I will identify the other participating hikers by the following pseudonyms:  Tom, Bruce, and Rick.  Our plan was to hike the Loy Cannon trail up to Secret Mountain, and hook up with the Secret Mountain Canyon trail, ending at Devil’s Bridge.  One internet site said there was an “unofficial” trail that would link the two trails.  However, when we mentioned it to one of the officials at the tourist information building in Sedona, she feigned ignorance, even displaying some doubt about its existence.  After giving us a skeptical eye, she said, “Well, you guys look savvy enough.”  It was a challenge we could not help but accept.




My Three Amigos preparing for the hike.

 We stopped at some stores in Sedona to get final supplies such as fresh fruit, cooking gas and other food that doesn’t travel well on airplanes.  The outfitting store in Sedona is hardly what one would consider hard-core.  It had about one of everything, but was rather pricey and not prepared for a rush on water bags, for instance.  It was obviously geared toward the day-hiking crowd, not serious hikers such as ourselves.  The staff was pleasant enough, but was not the type to offer valuable backpacking advice.  When we asked about the unofficial trail, we got a bunch of blank stares which seemed to say, “Go off the trails?  Can you do that?”  Obviously if we were going to do this, it would be by our own skill and cunning.

We planned to be out for a good day and a half, perhaps two.  Since we were hiking in a desert area, we needed to carry all our water as well as food and other supplies.  We all started with about 40 lbs. in our backpacks, with the notable exception of Bruce who once again had the heaviest pack at 45 lbs.  Why he consistently has more weight in his pack is a great mystery to the rest of us.  He also insists on pitching his tent some distance from the other tents.  I have some theories as to why this is, but have not been able to prove anything up to this point.  He claims it is due to carrying the medical supplies, but I didn’t think sutures, aspirin and Imodium tablets weigh that much.

 

We left Bruce’s rental car, a PT Cruiser at Devil’s Bridge after traveling several miles on roads that reminded me of Haiti.  If ever there were shovel-ready infrastructure projects, it would be these roads.  My theory is that the locals like them that way as it supports the Pink Jeep Tours company.  As a Jeep owner, I think pink Jeeps are an abomination.  But Sedona is somewhat “otherworldly” with its mysticism, vortexes, and conehead-shaped buildings.  We drove our other vehicle, a Nissan Pathfinder, to the trailhead for Loy Canyon and headed off down the trail around noon on Wednesday.  Just before we left, Bruce almost tossed the keys to the PT Cruiser in the back of the Pathfinder.  What an unpleasant realization that would have been to reach the end of our hike at Devil’s Bridge to find we were locked out of the car.  This was the first of several near misses, but ended up being inconsequential, as you will find if you continue reading this account.  There was also a discussion about leaving some of the food in the vehicle since we were only going to be out for a day and a half at most.  In the end, we decided to take the extra meal just to be safe.  At noon on Wednesday we were ready to leave civilization behind and start on the trail.

 

The first part of the hike was through terrain that you would associate with Arizona.  It was relatively flat with rather sparse vegetation and trees.  The path was very sandy, which is not the easiest material on which to hike, but the weather was beautiful, sunny and probably in the upper 70’s.  At our first resting point probably an hour into the hike, a thought entered my mind.  I turned to Bruce and said, “Did you bring the cooking gas canisters?”  “No.”  My questioning look caused him to reiterate, “No, I’m not joking.  I didn’t bring them.”  Since I didn’t bring them either, we realized that the gas canisters were locked in the PT Cruiser at the other end of the trail.  We briefly discussed sending someone to get them, but decided that would take too long and we could get along with building fires to cook over instead.  Somehow that idea appealed to the rugged outdoorsmen in us.  My only regret was that I was carrying the burner and would rather have not had to carry unnecessary weight, even if it was about a pound.

 

We continued along the floor of the valley, which soon narrowed into Loy Canyon.  The south side of the canyon had tall pine trees virtually unbroken to the top several hundred feet above.  We came across a small patch of snow, which Bruce quickly converted into a snowball to toss at me.  We hadn’t expected to see snow in Arizona at this time of year.  The north side of the canyon, which received all the sun, was quite desert-like with cactus and yucca plants.  The trail wound up the north side with a series of switchbacks.  Due to the high elevation (5000-6000 feet), the steepness of the path and weight of our backpacks, we had to stop several times to rest.  During one of the stops, Bruce slipped and in putting his hand down to catch himself, placed in squarely on a dead cactus.  It looked quite painful, but he showed great self control as he furiously tried to rid his hand of the needles.  He was able to remove most of them, but I suspect it hurt more than he would stoically admit.  We continued on with Bruce nursing his bloodied hand.

 

Secret Mountain Campsite

We reached our first campsite at the top of Secret Mountain, a large plateau at an elevation of 6600 feet.  I’m not sure why it is called Secret Mountain as something of that size is not easily hidden.  It was fairly remote, exhibiting few signs of current or past visitors, so I guess that will have to do for my explanation.  Upon reaching the top in the late afternoon, we selected a campsite, pitched our tents and built a fire.  Officially, we were supposed to be ¼ mile off the trail, but that is virtually impossible with the canyons and placement of the trail.  Since we had only seen two dayhikers on the trail, we thought we would be OK.  With a skilled outdoorsman like Tom, it turned out we didn’t need the gas canisters for cooking.  The fire we built worked well enough to heat the water to pour into the packets of freeze-dried food for supper.  After supper, we took a quick hike to the other side of the mountain in time to see the sun set over the neighboring ridge.  Soon after, the temperature began dropping quickly.  It was rather windy as well which made it seem even colder.  I would guess that it was in the mid to upper 30s that night.  Even though my mummy bag is rated to 20 degrees, I was freezing.  I think part of the problem was that I was not drinking enough.  Since we didn’t have a water source, we needed to conserve the water we were carrying.  It seemed that I woke up every half hour all night long.  So in the morning, I was cold and tired.  Some vacation, huh!  However, as one of my former roommates used to say, “A bad day in the field is better than a good day in the office.”  There probably are limits to that.

The great thing about hiking is that when the morning sun hits you, nothing from before matters.  We were all excited about our planned descent into Secret Mountain Canyon.  The plan was to get down into the canyon and then follow it out to the start of the official trail, some 3 or 4 miles later and then follow the trail to the PT Cruiser.  If it took a little longer, we would camp close to the trailhead that night and head out the next morning (Friday) to do some other day hikes.  No hiking story would be complete without a brief discourse (or rant, as some would call it) on day-hiking.  On our previous trip, which was my first real experience in backpacking, we would struggle up the mountains with our 30+ pound packs arriving at the summit only to be greeted by a day-hiker in shorts with his dog.  It completely ruined the summiting moment and negated the tremendous sense of accomplishment of scaling such a peak.  By the end of that trip, I had begun to harbor unkind thoughts about such people, even secretly despising them in my heart.  I confessed this fault to my fellow hikers, which, in retrospect, was probably not the wisest decision as they passed over few opportunities to stoke the fire of my anger.  Anyway, we thought we would be back in enough time to do some day hikes, which can sometimes be umm… interesting excursions.

As we descended from Secret Mountain into the canyon, I remember thinking that I was glad we wouldn’t be trying to come back up that way.  The descent was manageable, but long and fairly steep.  There was no trail here, so we were just picking our way down, trying not to dislodge too many rocks on the guys below us while avoiding the unpleasant flora of the area.  It took about a half hour to descend the couple of hundred feet to the canyon bottom.

 

As we arrived at the bottom, we discovered two things we had not planned on:  snow and a stream.  We found out later that this area had an unusually heavy snow this past winter which had not completely melted at this time.  In the shaded parts of the bottom of the canyon, snow above our knees was not unusual.  Since the temperature there was warm (probably in the 50’s), the snow melt was significant, which was causing the stream.  As a result, we could not walk down the center of the canyon as we had planned.  Instead, we had to pick our way along one side or the other.  Even though the flora had not begun to bloom, the thorns from last year were thick.  We joked that our two rules were:  Stay away from the thorns, and Everything has thorns.  I wore my leather biking gloves, which helped significantly.  The other guys’ forearms looked like they had been scourged.  Our progress was painfully slow.

 

Occasionally we would have to cross the stream as it meandered from one side of the canyon to the other.  This was always treacherous as the rocks were often unstable, and what appeared to be stable snow drifts were just shells not able to support the weight of men with loaded backpacks.  On one such occasion, Rick fell through the shell with both feet and landed on his back with both feet in the water.  He exclaimed, “I am SO done!”  Most of us had similar thoughts at that point.  All of us had put at least one foot in the frigid water at least once, allowing our waterproof boots to become wet.  But, we continued to press on because THAT’S WHAT REAL OUTDOORSMEN DO!  It certainly had nothing to do with our intelligence (or maybe it did).  Because of the cooler temperatures and the constant struggle to press forward, I had forgotten to drink my water as I should have.  Without knowing, I had become very dehydrated.  We stopped for lunch and discussed how far we had come and how far we had to go.  At this point we were somewhat discouraged, but confident that we would soon meet up with the other trail.  We had been hiking for 3 hours and were hoping we had covered most of the distance between the two trails.  Looking back now, we realize we probably had only gone 1 ½ miles, nowhere close to the 3-4 miles of bushwacking we needed to do.  Since we were going downstream, we hoped the canyon would open up at any point making the way easier.

 

Shortly after we finished lunch, I began feeling worse and worse.  When we next stopped for a normal rest, I realized I was in big trouble and also finally realized that I was dehydrated.  I let my pack down and half sprawled on top of it drinking some water and laying in the warm sun.  However, it was too late for that.  I became violently ill.  As I lay there, I began running through the possibilities.  There was no place for a helicopter to land, so one way or another I was going to have to hike out of there.  We had not seen any sign of another trail out of the canyon, so the only choices were to proceed forward or retrace our path.  We had food through the next day’s lunch, so we wouldn’t starve until then.  None of these options looked very good.  I was even starting to hope we would see a day-hiker to point an easy way out of the canyon.  In fact, if one had appeared, I would have given him or her a big hug with a friendly pat on the head for their dog!  Obviously I was borderline delusional.  One of the guys did some scouting ahead and thought we should continue, which was not exactly what I had hoped, but since they took some of the weight from my pack, I “girded up my loins” so to speak and followed them.

 

The pack was definitely lighter, but probably still weighed 25 lbs. or so.  After we had gone on for probably another 45 minutes, we came to a point where the canyon once again closed to an opening just large enough for the stream.  Tom went on a short scouting trip to see what would happen if we started up one side of the canyon to go around the impassable stream area.  When he came back, the other guys held a council to see what to do.  I had been following several hundred feet behind them and when they stopped, I stopped where I was instead of joining them.  I figured that if they were going to turn around (which was my hope), I would have saved a couple of hundred feet of hiking, which was important given my current condition.  When their council concluded, it was agreed that we needed to turn around and go back.  We estimate that the 6 hours we had been hiking had taken us only 2 miles from the start of our bushwacking and there was probably another 2 miles to go.  Although none of us liked the idea of giving up, things didn’t seem to be getting any easier, and we would still have a long hike after we joined up with the other trail.  So, feeling somewhat defeated, our fearless group backtracked about ½ hour to a spot that seemed semi-hospitable to pitch camp.

 

Setting up camp seemed to make everyone feel better, or at least it made ME feel better which was my major concern at the time.  Up to this point in the narrative, I have dwelt primarily on unfavorable aspects of the trip.  However, there were many positives.  The weather was beautiful.  There were no insects.  We were right by an excellent water source.  We weren’t lost, by any means and had enough rations to last comfortably another day.  There is something peaceful about camping by a brook, listening to the water rush over the rocks and looking up through the top of the tent to see the stars overhead.  Although not normally a food fanatic (I eat to live, not live to eat), I have to admit that I have tasted few meals as good as the ones we had on the trail.  I was also taking care to recover from my dehydration and was feeling much better.  Perhaps part of that feeling was the idea that in the morning we would be heading out of the canyon!

 

I slept better that night, but again it was cold.  Very cold.  Later Bruce confessed that this was his fault.  He woke up around 2 in the morning and prayed that it would freeze.  His concern was that if the snow continued to melt, some of the stream crossings that we had made would no longer be passable.  He thought the noise of the stream had increased, meaning the water level was rising.  Several of the crossings had required us to step on slightly submerged rocks.  A couple more inches of frigid water would have made a significant difference.  Well, whether it was his prayer or not, it did freeze that night.  In the morning I found that the water bag I left outside had a good layer of ice in it.  I would guess it was in the upper 20’s for a good part of the night.  Trust me, it was cold.  I had thermal underwear under my clothes and I had my fleece jacket on.  All that and I was inside my mummy bag.

 

We started our morning early.  Normally we would get on the trail around 9:00.  However, knowing the trek we had before us we got up at 6:00 hoping to get going by 7:00 after a granola bar breakfast.  We did pretty well, especially considering it was cold and dark.  The cold overnight temperatures had several effects on our hiking.  First, as Bruce predicted, the freezing temperature seemed to have dropped the stream level, making the crossings easier.  Also, the snow drifts now had a crust on the top, which allowed some of us to walk over the tops easier.  On the negative side, some of the rocks in the stream were now iced over, making them very slick.  Interestingly, not all of the rocks were affected in similar manners.  We soon learned which rocks had a higher propensity to be iced.  Overall, however, the going was much easier.  That coupled with being able to follow our trail from the previous day led us to move much faster than we had anticipated.  It seemed like no time at all before we were standing at the bottom of the side canyon we had come down just 24 hours before.  Remember that one?  The one I was thankful that we were only going down it?  Well, now we had to go up.  It was a struggle, but we were highly motivated to get out of there.  According to Bruce, who knows everything, it generally takes twice as long to go up as it does to go down.  That proved to be about right.  We were now close to the place we had camped the first night, having covered in less than 3 hours what it had taken us 5 hours to do the previous day.  After a short rest, we headed back down the Loy Canyon trail to our Pathfinder, arriving there slightly after noon, 48 hours after we originally set out, but much wiser and more thankful!

 

 

It is amazing how the human mind works.  As we hiked out of the first canyon and began realizing that we were actually going to make it all the way out, we shed our concerned attitudes and began talking about how it really hadn’t been that bad.  Maybe we should have gone on instead of turning around.  My feelings toward day-hikers gravitated back to normal as well.  Fortunately we didn’t see any on that trail.  There was even discussion about how we would approach it differently if we came back at another time!  We were all tired with numerous scrapes and bruises, but it still felt good to be done.  We did miss the sense of accomplishment or satisfaction that normally accompanies a good hiking trip since we didn’t make it to our original targeted destination.  It’s kind of like spending a long time reading an account of someone else’s adventure, getting to the end and realizing you wasted 15 minutes that you will never get back…