We spent two weeks in the Sedona/Verde Valley, AZ area and we get it now. We understand why people flock to this area. This area is a hiker’s dream.

So many hikes…so little time! I think every cairn we saw had multiple hikes with arrows pointing you in the right direction.

And then you’ve got the views. Nice, right? It’s hard to be in anything but a good mood when you’re surrounded by views like the one in the picture above. And those views are in every direction!

We spent as much time as we could getting in as many hikes as we could. We ended up getting nine hikes in with a combined total of about twenty miles and we didn’t even scratch the surface when it comes to all of the available hikes in the area! I won’t go in to great detail about each one of our hikes, but I’ll give you some of the highlights.

One of the first hikes we did was the Baldwin Trail. This was a loop trail that gave us some amazing views of Cathedral Rock. You can see Littlest and The Dude standing in front of Cathedral Rock in the picture above.

We spent an afternoon hiking around four miles of the trails at the Red Rock State Park. The leaves in Sedona were starting to change to fall colors. I thought the yellows and oranges next to the red of the House of Apache Fire was pretty.

One of our favorite hikes was the Boynton Canyon hike. We started off surrounded by the red rocks this part of Arizona is known for,

but ended up in a ponderosa pine forest

where we had to stop and smell…the trees! Ponderosa pine trees smell like vanilla and sometimes they smell like butterscotch! The bigger the tree the stronger the scent.

We got to see some fall colors in the forest. It’s been awhile since we’ve experienced actual fall colors and weather and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

At the end of the Boynton Canyon hike is a wonderful view of the box canyon you just hiked through. The sun was in the wrong spot for me to really get any great shots, but you can get an idea of what our view was in the picture above.

Another of our favorite hikes is the Devil’s Bridge hike. We were lucky enough to have a four-wheel drive vehicle so what would have been more like a six mile hike was only a two mile hike!

This hike had some truly Harding Icefield worthy hiking!

The views even rivaled what we saw during the Harding Icefield hike! Can you tell we still compare everything to Alaska?

This is the Devi’s Bridge. It was spectacular!

There was a path to the top of the bridge and a path that takes you under it. We, of course, had to check out both paths.

We did one hike twice. What you’re looking at in the picture above is Bell Rock. You can hike to it then climb all over it!

The view from part way up Bell Rock is pretty fantastic!

See those white dots in the middle of the above photo? Those teeny tiny, dots are Jerl and the boys. I scrambled up about half way then decided to sit and enjoy the view, but Jerl and the boys wanted to see how far up they could get. 

A fun thing to do in the Sedona area is look for the rock formations that have names. You can get a map pretty much anywhere with the rock formations and their locations. We saw a few during our explorations. The one above is The Sphinx.

This one is The Teapot. There’s one called Snoopy Rock. We tried our hardest to find it, but never saw it.

We saw a few flowers on our many hikes. Not many though.

Even here in sunny Arizona, it’s the wrong season for most flowers.

We did see a ton of agave. The stuff is seriously everywhere!

There’s just so much awesome in the Sedona area, I’m going to break it up into two posts. In the next post I’ll tell you about one of the towns we went to and the National Monuments we visited. We drove one of the many four-wheel drive roads. Jerl is going to do a post on that for you. It was quite the adventure!

See y’all down the road!