Grand Canyon, Sedona & the Arizona Back Roads

We flew into Phoenix on a Saturday morning and were in Sedona by lunch, which is a fast way to make ten people from Texas very quiet. The rocks really are that red. One of our travelers, a retired schoolteacher from Round Rock, said she'd seen a thousand pictures and none of them got the color right. We heard some version of that all week.

Sedona was busy, as it always is in October. We beat the crowds by starting hikes early, and the Cathedral Rock trail at 7am was a different place than it would've been at 10. The line for photos at Devil's Bridge was about forty minutes long, and four of us decided the view from the bottom was plenty. They were right.

The surprise of the trip was Jerome, the old copper mining town hanging off the side of Cleopatra Hill. Half the group had never heard of it. We spent a long afternoon in the galleries and the old hotel, and two people bought paintings they had to ship home.

Then the canyon. We spent two nights at the South Rim and saw three sunrises and two sunsets, because once people saw the first one they wanted to go back. At Hopi Point, the wind took a straw hat right off a traveler's head and over the edge. He watched it float away for a good ten seconds and said, "Well, it lives here now."

On the last day we stopped at Slide Rock, where Oak Creek runs down a natural rock chute. Everyone said the water was "refreshing." It was about 55 degrees. Nobody stayed in long.