| Sedona, AZ |

So I was just digging into my pizza and about to start writing about the day’s adventures in Sedona when I witnessed one of the more ridiculous things I’ve seen in some time.

A delivery driver came in to pickup his order, the girl at the counter said ‘Here’s your plates and napkins’, went to get the pizza and the delivery guy, apparently in a daze of some sort, left.

And went to deliver the plates and napkins.

Now if I ordered a pizza and the driver showed up with just plates and napkins, I’d likely think I was being punked.

And thus, I’d probably wonder where my damn pizza was. And I’d have to assume, that all things being equal, I’d be a somewhat less than satisfied customer.

Well Mr. Customer take heart that your favorite pizza place is not at fault. The blame lies 100% on a more than somewhat absent minded delivery driver.

Bon appetit.

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Sedona, AZ is a lot of things.

Most importantly, it’s the home of the glorious Red Rock mountains.

But in being that home, as you would imagine, it’s quite a popular place to be.

And unlike any other spectacular set of mountains I’ve ever been to, it’s also home to a town. A fairly large town. In the middle of the valley which holds those mountains.

Which to me at least makes it a curiosity.

For example, as I drove into the valley, I was blown away by the stunning triumph that is those Red Rocks.

Then the very next thing that I noticed was a Famous Footwear. And a Subway.

Which seemed more than a little out of place, as they were laid out right at the foot of nature’s masterpiece.

Then more chain stores, then the traffic, a golf course and multiple residential neighborhoods; literally running up the very walls of those magnificent red rocks.

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Look, it’s important this critique doesn’t come off the wrong way.

The Red Rock mountains are a remarkable display of nature’s utter magnificent ability to lay waste to whatever we think of, when we think of the best that she can do.

Because in my experience, nature always – and I mean always – has an ace up her sleeve.

It’s just that…well…

Sedona doesn’t seem like it belongs there.

Now, I assume the residents of said town would disagree, and quite frankly, I would likely disagree as well should I live there.

But I don’t live there.

And because of that, I have a different point of view. And to me at least, the presence of that town, in that place seemed – and I warn in advance that any Sedon’ites that happen to be reading this right now are not going to like this opinion…

Well, it seemed, sacrilegious.

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With that out of the way…

I had a damn good time on my hike and through incredibly fortunate happenstance, met a great guy and his great sister, and even for a substantial piece of that hike, transformed into a bedouin.

Lots there to explain, so as they say, let’s begin at the beginning.

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In the beginning, God created… Oh damn. Sorry. Wrong beginning.

In this beginning, I, Jon, created a plan for a hike which would keep me as far away from the likely hordes of tourists, selfie-stars and LL Bean enthusiasts, as possible.

Now given that I am indeed a tourist myself, this may seem inappropriately hypocritical – but by now no doubt you know that I prefer my solitude.

And in such, I tend to seek out quieter hikes. They’re a good chance for deep thought and reflection, and those things are harder to accomplish when you’re tripping over each other on the trail.

For example, just the other night on Spruce Mountain and the entirety of that 9+ miles, I had the entire trail to myself. Literally.

At the start of that hike, there was one other car at the trailhead, but that was it. I never did meet he or she up there and by the time I got done, they were gone.

It’s a strangely wonderful feeling having an entire mountain to yourself for more than nine miles and well over three hours.

(Technically I wasn’t totally without other life up there, as I did see several deer and a wild turkey near the summit, but they kept to themselves and weren’t much for conversation)

It can really be very freeing and illuminating if you let it, and in as much as I am ever free or illuminated, those are the times that it tends to happen with the least amount of effort.

But getting back to this trail; it was an unusual one.

For probably 75% of the eight or so miles, I was again, alone. 15% was some people and the other 10% was like Black Friday at your local mall.

But Cathedral Rock is where my friend AllTrails said the surge would be, so it was fully expected, and there was a cool sense of camaraderie as the mountain gleefully made fools out of many of us.

Though I will say that some of these folks were getting much closer to a non-spousal human than they may have wanted – and in addition were taking enormous risks that their health insurance company certainly wouldn’t at all appreciate.

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Now here, on the Catherdral Rock spur is where the story takes a very pleasant turn for me.

You see, I hadn’t planned on going to the rock at all.

Between the length of the loop I was on, it’s level of difficulty and the fact that the sun was baking me like an egg on the sidewalk, I figured eight miles was enough.

But I stumbled off my trail, onto the Rock trail and by the time I figured it out I was already a good chunk of the way up – so up I went.

And I am tremendously glad that I did.

Because at the top as myself and the other folks there stared into the beauteous landscape in front of us, I got to talking to a guy, who I later knew as Charles.

Charles from Chicago.

As I’ve written about before, one of the tremendously positive benefits of travel is the ability to meet people. People from different places, of different backgrounds and persuasions, etc.

And then the ability to just talk to them in the spirit of renewing that long lost art of, conversation.

So talk we did.

As we hiked down from the top of the rock, it turned out we had quite a bit in common in age, family and a variety of other ways.

Conversation flowed freely as it does when you meet a kindred spirit and I was entirely happy to have stumbled into meeting him.

A little further down I got to meet his sister, Robin, who he was in town visiting and she was a lovely woman who it turned out shared a lot of my outdoor passions.

So we chatted for a little further on before very sadly, we had to part ways as I went back to my loop. We exchanged info, said our goodbyes and I’d certainly like to at least loosely stay in touch.

He was just a real nice guy, all in all.

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Now remember that this interaction could have been waylayed in any number of ways.

In order for us to meet, we had to obviously both be up there at the same time and I wasn’t supposed to be up there at all.

In addition, I and he both had to get to our respective trails at a certain time and needed to hike at a certain pace. For that to have happened, how many inter-day decisions had to converge? Certainly hundreds, on both sides, at least.

How many other developments in our lives are like that? Well, if you read my previous post entitled Fragility you have an insight into my feelings on the subject.

Call it luck, good fortune, happenstance, fate or choose to call it nothing at all.

To me, it’s still pretty cool.

Last note on this trail is that the Arizona sun is relentless. Absolutely relentless.

The day started with a mix of sun and clouds and was pretty pleasant for hiking – and then the clouds pulled a Houdini and it was all sun.

And that last couple of miles got decidedly unpleasant for hiking, for me at least.

What is amazing to me is that it was only in the upper 70’s / low 80’s yesterday. Arizona is consistently into the upper 90’s / 100’s / 110’s not too much later in the year than my April hike.

No thank you.

Earlier in the day I visited Montezuma Castle. Which was absurdly named as such by early-European explorers, despite the fact that Montezuma was born well after the dwelling was abandoned, and also despite the fact that it isn’t…a castle.

That said, building an apartment building literally into the side of a cliff some 90 feet off the ground, was an amazing feat of engineering by the Sinagua people some 800 years ago. And it’s still there today!

To me it was yet another good reminder that people lived on the North American continent long before the days of Mr. Columbus, and even long before the Vikings beat him here some 500 years before.