Sedona

Travel Day - Camp Verde, AZ

On Sunday I made the 80 mile drive down to Camp Verde, Arizona in a little less than two hours. It has been really nice having these short drive days where I don’t have to deal with getting gas with my trailer hooked up. Even though it was a short drive by distance, it was from about 7000 feet down to about 3000 feet and the temperature adjusted accordingly. I got spoiled with almost perfect weather last week, highs of 80 during the day and lows in the 50s at night, but I’m back to 90+ during the day and mid 70s at night. This campground might be the smallest campsites yet, but the proximity to Sedona is very nice:

Tuzigoot National Monument

Monday morning I went to the Tuzigoot National Monument, which is another pueblo in the area, but they think this one grew to as many as 110 rooms at one point, which makes it one of the larger pueblos in the area. One cool thing about this one is you were allowed to go to the top of the highest room which had a great view of many of the other rooms and the area:

Montezuma Castle National Monument

There was another small monument near by that had a short trail that took you in front of this cliff dwelling called Montezuma Castle: They used to allow you to climb ladders and explore the rooms, but had to stop in the (I think) 1950s due to vandalism.

Devil’s Bridge

Tuesday I drove up to Sedona and did Devil’s Bridge via Chuck Wagon Trail. Just driving in to and out of Sedona is beautiful, but hiking up to get a good view was awesome. I ended up getting to the trailhead a little later than I originally hoped, so I had to wait for a spot in the parking lot to open up for about 30 minutes. I spent a lot of that 30 minutes debating whether it was worth sticking around, and I’m glad I did. The hike out was awesome, lots of gorgeous red rocks all around: The first viewpoint was amazing:

Getting all the way up to the bridge was a little bit more “scrambly” than I would have liked, but the view was worth it:

On the way back I followed a “road” that was marked for high clearance vehicles only. The definition of high clearance has been pretty vague for most of the roads I had seen up until this point but generally most pickups or Jeeps would have been fine, but this road was a whole other level and made me glad I was hiking it instead of attempting to drive it. While walking, I ended up passing a Jeep Wrangler that was trying to navigate the road without scraping its bottom on some of the rocks.

7 Sacred Pools

Wednesday I woke up to rain, but decided to continue with my plans to hike the 7 Sacred Pools loop. I was concerned with how slippery the rocks might be, as a large part of the trail was supposed to be on bedrock, but the rock ended up not being a problem. I did slide several times through some of the mud though, there were some very slippery parts. You can see the first few of the 7 Sacred Pools:

The rain was annoying, but I could deal with it since it meant cooler temperatures and less people on the trail, but when I got to the top of the hill and couldn’t see much because of the fog, I wasn’t super happy:

Of course towards the very end of the 5.5 miles, the fog started lifting a bit and I did get to see a little of the rock formations through the rain at least: Overall, I’ve been very lucky, this was the first time it rained the whole time I was hiking, and there have only been a couple days on this trip where I have skipped hiking altogether because of rain.

Verde Valley Wine Tasting

Ranked as the fourth best wine region in the US (it’s not clear when or by whom), I decided to do some wine tastings on Thursday. I went to a small town called Jerome that had six winery tasting rooms, and they were all within a few blocks. None of them grew their own grapes on those properties, but they all had at least a few of their wines made from grapes grown in Arizona. At an estimated average price of around $45 a bottle, that is pretty significantly more than I’m willing to pay for a bottle of wine, even when I’m employed, so I ended up just enjoying the tastings and not buying any bottles. Jerome was at a little bit of a higher elevation making it comfortable to be outside when it wasn’t raining, so it was nice to be on the patios and decks enjoying the view of the red rocks near Sedona below.