Airport Mesa: The Tabletop Runway
Near Sedona, Arizona
The flat topped mesa southwest of downtown wears something unusual on its crown, an airport. Sedona's runway sits directly on top of the mesa, which is why pilots call it a tabletop or aircraft carrier airport, with steep drop offs on nearly every side. It opened in nineteen fifty-five as little more than a dirt strip, so rough that coyotes wandered across it, and it was not paved until nineteen fifty-seven.
The mesa top stands about four thousand eight hundred thirty feet above sea level, well above the valley floor, and like everything here it is capped with hard red sandstone that resisted erosion while the softer ground around it washed away. For a stretch in the nineteen eighties and early nineties a small airline even flew scheduled service from this mesa before it folded. Today the runway serves private planes and scenic flights, but most visitors come for the edges rather than the airstrip.
From the mesa you can see Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, and the great hump of Capitol Butte all at once, one of the finest panoramas in a town full of them.
