Sedona's Energy Vortexes: Tourism Built on Intuition

In nineteen eighty-one, a woman named Page Bryant, who described herself as a psychic channel, identified four sites in the red rocks around Sedona as centers of concentrated spiritual energy. She called them vortexes. Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock, Airport Mesa, and Boynton Canyon, she said, were places where the earth's energy spiraled upward in a way that could be felt by sensitive individuals.

Geomagnetic surveys of the four sites have detected no anomalies. The rock formations are geologically similar to the red-rock formations throughout the Colorado Plateau. There is no scientific mechanism that has been proposed or tested to explain a vortex effect.

None of that has mattered to the tourism economy.

By the nineteen nineties, the vortex concept had been amplified by New Age writers, tour operators, crystal shops, and retreat centers into the dominant frame for what Sedona was about. The town that had fewer than two hundred fifty residents in nineteen forty-five now receives approximately three million visitors per year, and a significant portion of them come specifically for the vortexes. They hire guides. They buy crystals and books and ceremonial tools. They participate in group meditations on red-rock summits.

The Sedona Heritage Museum documents this transition plainly. The landscape is real, the light is real, and the feeling of something significant in the red-rock country is described by visitors who have never heard of Page Bryant and would not call themselves New Age. Whether that feeling constitutes evidence of anything beyond the landscape's physical impressiveness is a question the museum declines to answer.

What is certain is the economic fact: a town built an identity on a claim made by one psychic in nineteen eighty-one and turned it into a multi-million-dollar industry. The intuition outlasted any argument against it.