The Red Rock Capital That Almost Wasn't: Sedona and the Oak Creek Canyon Road

The color comes from iron oxide. The red sandstone formations rising above Sedona are Schnebly Hill Formation rock, laid down as ancient sand dunes and river deposits roughly two hundred eighty million years ago, then stained over geological time by iron minerals oxidizing in the presence of water and air. The red is rust, at a scale that rewrites your sense of scale.

Coconino National Forest surrounds and interpenetrates Sedona on three sides. The forest is the reason the red rock amphitheater exists as a preserved landscape rather than a subdivided one. More than one and a half million acres of ponderosa pine, canyon juniper, and red rock canyon lands stretch north and east from the Verde Valley, making Coconino the third-largest national forest in the continental United States by area. Most of what you see from Sedona's viewpoints falls within its boundary.

The road down Oak Creek Canyon, State Route Eighty-Nine A, was built between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty-nine by a combination of county effort and federal highway labor. Before the road, the canyon was accessible only by foot and horseback. The settlement of Oak Creek, below the canyon, had been founded by farmers in the eighteen seventies who reached it by a trail so steep that horses had to be lowered by rope. The canyon walls, rising fifteen hundred feet on either side, had kept the landscape functionally isolated for sixty years.

The road changed that. Artists, most famously the Cowboy Artists of America founders who worked out of Sedona from the nineteen sixties forward, were among the first to recognize what the light and the geology offered. Photographers followed. The tourism economy arrived in force by the nineteen eighties, carrying with it a new industry in what the town began marketing as vortexes, energy centers in the rock formations that practitioners of New Age spirituality claimed as sites of heightened electromagnetic or spiritual power. The vortex economy, as covered earlier on this route, runs on a foundation of genuine geological drama dressed in the language of personal transformation.