For Aimee — a Juneteenth getaway in the red rocks she fell in love with on sight. Not quite her birthday (that's coming, in Amsterdam). Call it an early gift.
Day 1 — Thursday, June 18: "Aimeeland"
It started the way the good ones do: a first-class seat and an unhurried hour at the Centurion Lounge at SeaTac before the flight even boarded. The flight was smooth, the rental car painless, and the drive up from Phoenix was an easy two hours. We rolled into town in the early afternoon, the heat still up but the red rocks wide open in the bright light.
Aimee took one look at the red rocks and was gone. Smitten. And right on cue, as if the universe had cued the soundtrack, her Coldplay song — "Coloratura" — came on as we pulled into town. That was the moment it got its name. Aimeeland. It stuck immediately and it's been the name of the whole trip ever since.
Dinner was at Mole Ingenious Mexican Kitchen — very good, exactly the kind of place you want on a first night. We swung through Whole Foods to provision for tomorrow's big canyon day, then pulled up to the resort.
This place is something else. We're in Room 10, creekside, and it has everything — a rooftop deck, a creek running past, the whole package. Aimee's actual birthday isn't until July 14, which we'll be spending in Amsterdam — so this wasn't really a birthday trip so much as a getaway over the Juneteenth holiday, planned just because I wanted to do something nice. But it landed somewhere in the warm overlap between an early birthday and a Christmas-in-June present, and when the staff caught wind that a celebration was in the air, they ran with it — wishing her a happy birthday all evening and welcoming us with a free bottle of wine. We let them. We stretched our legs on a short hike near the hotel and — naturally — found a geocache while we were at it. Then back to the pool, drinks in hand, with live harp music drifting across the water. Harp music. Poolside. Only in Sedona.
What is a "Landscape Hotel"?
Ambiente bills itself as North America's first landscape hotel — 40 cube-shaped "atriums" raised on steel piers and wrapped in floor-to-ceiling bronze-tinted glass, opened in spring 2023. The whole idea is low-impact architecture that lets the land take center stage rather than imposing on it. The founders, sisters Jennifer May and Colleen TeBrake, were inspired by similar properties in Norway and Spain. Even that creek outside Room 10 is part of the design — the landscape architects built water features along the natural drainages using a process that mimics real rock, so every room feels creekside.
Later we went up to the rooftop deck for the main event. The stars. A thin crescent moon, and behind it more stars than the eye knows what to do with. I had Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" stuck in my head for some reason, watching satellites and starlight trade places overhead while the harp played on below. I pulled out the star finder app, and at first it was great — a few constellations, easy to follow. Then it became completely unmanageable. Too many stars. The sky just overwhelmed the software. Honestly the best possible failure mode.
What was in the sky tonight
That bright point near the crescent moon was Regulus — the heart of Leo, "The Heart of the Lion," and the anchor of the backward-question-mark Sickle asterism. The moon and Regulus rode just a few degrees apart on the evening of June 19. And the reason the whole sky was so absurdly full: Sedona is one of only about 20 certified Dark Sky Communities in the world, sitting at 4,500 feet with almost no light pollution. The star app never had a chance.
Then downstairs, and to sleep. Day one of Aimeeland: complete.
Day 2 — Friday, June 19: The Big Drive
I woke up and saw a rainbow on the wall. Is that a vortex? Maybe. We'll get to the vortex question. We had a good breakfast, went back up to the deck for some meditation and coffee, and got ourselves ready for the big adventure: the trip out to Antelope Canyon.
🌀 The Vortex Question
A Sedona vortex is said to be a center where the Earth's energy spirals in concentrated form — promoting healing, awareness, and a deeper connection to self. There are four main sites: Airport Mesa, Bell Rock, Boynton Canyon, and Cathedral Rock, and some people consider the whole town to be one big vortex. There's even a geology angle worth chewing on: parts of Sedona have high concentrations of iron oxide and quartz, and quartz's piezoelectric properties get cited as a possible mechanism.
Our guide later broke it down further — vortexes come in inflow and outflow types. Bell Rock and Airport Mesa are upflow (masculine) sites — energy spiraling up and out, tied to confidence and momentum. Cathedral Rock is an inflow (feminine) site — energy drawing inward, tied to emotional healing and grounding. Boynton Canyon is the balanced one. Worth noting the vortex concept only dates to the 1980s, layered over Native traditions in the same landscape that go back millennia. As for the rainbow on the wall — probably bronze glass refraction. But in Aimeeland, who's to say.
The drive out is its own event. Up through Oak Creek Canyon, which is a genuinely unique ecosystem — spring-fed Oak Creek itself is a rarity in Arizona, and we passed right by the headwaters. The geology stacks up the whole way as you climb out of the red rocks toward the Colorado Plateau.
🍎 Slide Rock & the Homestead Era
That apple-growing history we kept seeing belongs to Slide Rock State Park, the old Pendley Homestead — a 43-acre apple farm Frank Pendley claimed under the Homestead Act in 1910 after arriving in 1907. He built an irrigation system still in use today and planted his first orchard in 1912. It's one of the few homesteads left intact in the canyon, which connects to all those "inholdings" we talked about — private parcels grandfathered inside public land after the Coconino National Forest was established in 1908. And there's a beautiful full-circle detail: when the Pendleys sold in the 1980s, it was Governor Bruce Babbitt — the same Babbitt family whose ranch we'd drive past later — who pushed to make it a state park. The land keeps handing off between the same families.
We hit Flagstaff, which I'd been through before and still love — a great little town with a ton going on. We stopped at the guide's HQ to get oriented; one of the women there had just gotten back from an almost three-week Colorado River trip, which is its own kind of credential. One more coffee and we were off toward Lower Antelope Canyon, where a local Navajo guide would take us in.
The drive from there is a geology and history seminar at 65 miles an hour. We were on Route 66 for a stretch —
🛣️ Route 66 Turns 100
2026 is the Route 66 Centennial — the Mother Road's 100th birthday. Flagstaff threw its own celebration on June 6, just two weeks before we drove through, billing itself as the only 7,000-foot-elevation, pine-fresh, dark-sky city on the route. We caught it right on its hundredth year.
— and rolling past the volcanic country around the San Francisco Peaks, with Sunset Crater off to the side.
🌋 Sunset Crater & the People Who Came Before
Around 1085 CE, Sunset Crater erupted, burying the pithouses of the Sinagua people (Spanish for "without water") under cinder and lava. But the ash did something unexpected: it helped the soil hold moisture, and within a century a thriving agricultural and trading community rose at nearby Wupatki — over 100 rooms, a ceremonial kiva, and the northernmost ballcourt ever found in North America, drawing trade goods from as far as the Pacific and the Gulf Coast. The Hopi call the ancestral people the Hisatsinom, "the people who came before." A story of destruction turning into renewal, written into the ground we were driving over.
We crested a pass around 7,300 feet and then dropped all the way down toward 3,500, sliding out of the ponderosa pines — my favorite elevation band — into juniper-pine country. Big ranch families out here, cattle measured against acre-feet of water, a whole hard economy written on the land. There's even some Civil War history in Arizona, including a fight west of Tucson over a gold mine. Our guide mentioned the famous Gary Larson Far Side cartoon — the cows standing upright in the field who shout "Car!" and drop back to all fours. I remember that one. Long live Gary Larson.
Then the geology turned volcanic again — lava basalt around the Babbitt Ranch.
🏛️ The Babbitt Dynasty
My instinct was right: the Babbitts were deep in Arizona politics. The brothers arrived in Flagstaff in 1886 and became one of northern Arizona's most prominent ranching and merchant families. Bruce Babbitt — who grew up hiking and hunting up here and studied geophysics before turning to law — became a two-term Arizona governor, then U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Clinton, and even ran for president. The family still runs the ranch. That basalt country is literally theirs.
Past the old stagecoach life — boarded-up motels and gas stations, the ghosts of a road economy that tech and the interstates left behind — and into the Navajo Nation, with Hopi land sitting up on top of the mesas. The culture here runs as deep as anywhere I've been. It reminded me of Hawaii in that way — a living, ancient depth that a tourist only glimpses the surface of.
🕸️ The Weaving Movie
The film I kept thinking about — the elder weaving a rug while the young daughter tries to learn, and at the end the elder finishes and dies, with the daughter having hidden a thread so the rug could never be completed — that's rooted in a real and sacred Navajo tradition. Diné weavers often weave a "spirit line" (ch'ihónít'i) out to the edge of a finished rug: a deliberate thin line, a tiny imperfection, that lets the weaver's spirit and creative energy escape rather than be sealed inside the finished work. The whole tradition traces to Spider Woman (Na'ashjé'íí Asdzáá), who taught the Diné to weave and who lives atop Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly. The daughter hiding the thread was protecting the elder's spirit from being woven shut. No wonder it stuck with me all these years.
We passed Cameron Trading Post, saw the "No Uranium" signs staking out an old and ongoing fight, stopped at the Gap, and drove on deep into Navajo land toward the canyon. Wild country.
By the time we reached Page, the books I'd been reading were practically narrating the windshield — Zak Podmore's Life After Dead Pool on Lake Powell's collapse and Glen Canyon's strange ecological rebirth, and Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park on hiking the length of the Grand Canyon. And our guy Abbey hanging over all of it, as always.
Lower Antelope Canyon — Hasdestwazi, the Spiral Rock Arches
This was the heart of the day — the destination we'd spent the entire drive earning, hours of high desert and Navajo land unspooling just to reach a crack in the ground. And it did not disappoint. People come from all over the planet for this; it's been called the eighth wonder of the world, and the single most photographed slot canyon on Earth. We arrived to a scene of organized anticipation: tour groups staged by timed entry, Navajo guides gathering their people, and Aimee eyeing the stairs with real apprehension. From the surface it doesn't look like much — just a thin, unremarkable fissure splitting the desert floor, the kind of thing you could walk right past without a second glance. First views are deceptive. You step down through that narrow opening and the ordinary world overhead simply closes behind you. The temperature drops. The light goes liquid and strange. And suddenly you understand why this place is sacred.
🏜️ How the Canyon Was Made — and Why It's Sacred
Lower Antelope Canyon is carved into Navajo Sandstone laid down in the Jurassic, roughly 190 million years ago — ancient wind-blown desert dunes compacted and cemented into rock, with the old dune angles still legible in the sweeping diagonal "cross-bedding" on the walls. The slot itself is much younger, cut over thousands of years almost entirely by water, not wind. In this arid country, sudden violent flash floods funnel into a broad basin upstream, gain speed and grit in the narrowing passage, and grind through the soft stone like liquid sandpaper — twisting, deepening, and polishing it into those flowing, corkscrew curves. It's still happening; the canyon is never quite the same twice.
The colors — apricot, copper, rose, deep wine-red and purple — come from iron oxide in the sandstone, set on fire by sunlight bouncing down from the narrow opening above. The Navajo name says what the geology implies: Hasdestwazi, "spiral rock arches" (the English name comes from the pronghorn antelope that once grazed the rim). To the Diné this is a sacred place — entering it is likened to entering a cathedral, something you pause and compose yourself before doing — which is why access is by Navajo-guided tour only, and has been a Navajo Tribal Park since 1997. A sobering note under all the beauty: in 1997 a flash flood from a storm seven miles upstream, under near-clear skies overhead, killed eleven hikers in this very canyon. The bolted staircases and cargo nets you climb today exist because of that day. The land is gorgeous and it is not tame.
🌀 The Canyon's Human Story — Discovery, Refuge, and Pilgrimage
The geology explains the rock; it doesn't explain why we drove all day to stand in it. That's the human story. The Navajo have several accounts of how the canyon came to be known — one tradition holds it was found in 1864 by people fleeing the brutal "Long Walk," the forced 300-mile removal of the Diné to Bosque Redondo; another tells of a young Navajo girl who simply stumbled into it while herding sheep. In Navajo belief the canyon wasn't carved by erosion at all but shaped by the Holy People, a place where the spirit world and ours quietly intersect — which is why, every few years, the Diné hold a blessing ceremony giving thanks to the elements that made it.
For a long time almost nobody else knew it was here; into the 1980s it was the province of a few photographers and locals, until the Begay family opened it to guided tours and the images began circulating worldwide. Then it detonated into legend: in 2014 a single Peter Lik photograph taken in this canyon, Phantom, reportedly sold for $6.5 million — the most expensive photograph ever sold. That's the strange gravity of this place. A slot a few feet wide, in the middle of the Navajo Nation, that pulls millions of people across the world to look at light falling on stone. Standing down there, you get it completely.
We did it — Aimee and the stairs both. What an experience. Our guide knew this canyon the way you know your own hands, and he pulled images out of it we never would have found on our own: the famous swirl that became a Windows 10 desktop background, the seahorse formation (incredible), something he called the "rocky sunset." This is the Navajo way with the canyon — they love finding the faces and animals hidden in the rock, and a good guide turns the whole walk into a kind of treasure hunt. The Lady of the Wind is the most beloved of them, a profile the stone holds if you stand in exactly the right spot. He walked us through camera settings the entire way down — the light in there is tricky, a selective mix of position and bounce that no "auto" mode quite nails — which made every shot that much richer.
Aimee handled the steep descents like a champ. She'll admit to a couple of panic attacks on the way down those staircases — it's narrow, it's deep, the footing isn't always obvious, and the walls press close enough to touch on both sides at once — but she stayed solid and pushed through every one of them, and I was proud of her for it. The canyon itself is almost impossible to put into words, though people keep trying: Jurassic Park meets Star Wars meets Indiana Jones, somebody wrote, and that's not far off. Walls flowing like silk or poured honey, a few feet apart and rising twenty, thirty feet overhead. The famous hush — those enclosed chambers swallow sound so completely that a whisper carries and the crowd noise just disappears. Sand sifting down in thin ribbons from pockets in the rock, catching the light like smoke. And the color doing something different at every half-step: apricot deepening to copper, copper to rose, rose to a burnt wine-red where the sun can't quite reach, then a sudden shaft of gold where it can. We got real time down there — not the rushed shuffle you sometimes hear about — and standing inside what amounts to a hundred-and-ninety-million-year-old sunbeam, every single mile of the drive to get there paid for itself. This was the one. If the whole trip had been nothing but this hour underground, it would have been worth the flights.
Glen Canyon — Lunch on the Drowned Cathedral
Afterward we had lunch down at Glen Canyon Dam, and this was the stop where all my recent reading came up out of the page and stood right in front of me. I've been deep in the literature of this exact place — Zak Podmore's Life After Dead Pool, Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park, and of course the patron saint of this whole landscape, Edward Abbey — and here it all was, made physical. The guide had good vegetarian options sorted for us, so it was a genuinely nice meal eaten on top of one of the most contested pieces of ground in the American West. We forgot our National Park passports, but we grabbed the stamps anyway and stuck them on the map brochure.
🌊 Glen Canyon Dam — "The Place No One Knew"
Sitting there eating lunch, it's easy to forget you're looking at a wound that half the West is still arguing about. The dam is a 710-foot wall of concrete, built by the Bureau of Reclamation between 1956 and 1966, that backs the Colorado River up into Lake Powell — the second-largest reservoir in the country, drowning 186 miles of what was once Glen Canyon: a labyrinth of sandstone cathedrals, hanging gardens, seeps, springs, and thousands of Indigenous sites, now mostly underwater. Historian Sara Dant calls it the environmental movement's "girl who got away" — the loss they never got over. The bitter irony is in how it happened: conservationists, led by David Brower of the Sierra Club, agreed not to fight Glen Canyon in exchange for stopping a dam at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument. They saved a place they knew and traded away a place almost no one had seen. Brower called it the biggest mistake of his life.
And this is Abbey's ground zero. His 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang made the dam the white whale of its band of eco-saboteurs, and in 1981 the radical group Earth First! — inspired by the book — unfurled a 300-foot tapered black sheet of plastic down the dam's face to make it look like a giant crack had split it. Abbey himself spoke that day from the back of a pickup truck, calling the dam an invasion and Glen Canyon a treasure stolen by developers and politicians. "Surely no man-made structure in modern American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason," he said.
The fight he started isn't over — it's just changed shape. After two decades of drought, Lake Powell has dropped toward "dead pool," the level where water can no longer pass through the dam to generate power. As the reservoir has fallen, 100,000+ acres of drowned canyon have re-emerged — and ecologists are stunned by how fast the native ecosystems are clawing back to life. Podmore's whole book is about exactly that resurrection. Abbey wanted the river freed; aridification and climate may end up doing what the monkey wrench never could. Eating a veggie wrap above all that history felt almost absurd — and exactly right.
Then Horseshoe Bend.
Horseshoe Bend — The River That Trapped Itself
A photographer's dream and a furnace — 104 degrees, fully exposed, and packed with people all chasing the same impossible curve of river. We made the short walk out to the rim, took our shots, stood at the edge of that thousand-foot drop, soaked in the green water looping below, and then got ourselves back out of the heat with some urgency.
🐎 Horseshoe Bend — An Entrenched Meander
The thing that makes Horseshoe Bend a genuine geological oddity, not just a pretty curve, is that meanders like this aren't supposed to happen in canyon country. Rivers wander in lazy loops when they're crossing flat, soft floodplains with room to swing side to side — not when they're locked in solid rock. So how did the Colorado carve a near-perfect 270° horseshoe a thousand feet deep into Jurassic Navajo Sandstone? It wound itself into these loops millions of years ago, back when it ran lazily across a flat plain near sea level. Then, around 5–6 million years ago, the Colorado Plateau uplifted — and instead of being free to wander, the river got trapped in the pattern it had already drawn, forced to cut straight down through the rising rock while holding the exact shape it had carved in softer times.
That's an "entrenched meander," and this is one of the most spectacular examples on Earth. The overlook sits at 4,200 feet; the river runs at 3,200 — a clean 1,000-foot plunge. And it's still moving: geologists expect that someday the Colorado will erode straight through the narrow neck of the bend, abandon the loop, and leave the horseshoe high and dry as a cutoff meander. We caught it mid-story, the way you catch everything out here — a frozen instant in a process measured in millions of years. Abbey would've told us to climb down to the water, skip the crowd, and stay till dark. With a flight to catch and 104 degrees on the rim, we settled for reverence from the top.
The Long Drive Back
The drive home delivered one more gift: dust devils. Serious ones.
🌪️ Dust Devils & the Polarized Lens
Dust devils form when the sun heats the ground unevenly, sending up fast-rising columns of unstable air; the low pressure pulls surrounding air inward, it starts to spin, and it picks up dust until it's visible. May and June are peak season in Arizona. The reason my polarized sunglasses lit them up so dramatically: polarization cuts glare and scattered light, so subtle differences in dust density and air pop against the bright sky. I was seeing the structure of the vortex everyone else's eyes were skating right over.
We passed back through the Gap and Cameron Trading Post, and somewhere along the way the clock changed — because the Navajo Nation runs on its own time.
🕐 The Navajo Nation Time Warp
Arizona famously doesn't observe Daylight Saving Time — except the Navajo Nation does, because the reservation stretches into Utah and New Mexico, which both observe it, and the Nation keeps its territory on one clock. The kicker: the Hopi Reservation, completely surrounded by Navajo land, does not observe DST. So in summer you get Hopi on standard time, inside Navajo on daylight time, inside the rest of Arizona on standard time — a literal time-zone doughnut hole. Drive the wrong road and you can change your watch seven times. Does it count as a new country? Not for the passport. But the Nation has its own government, courts, police, laws, and time — so culturally, we crossed a real border today.
Still some snow up on Mt. Humphreys, the highest peak in Arizona — the same summit I tried for ten or eleven years back and had to abandon a quarter mile from the top in a brutal early-season snowstorm. But that's another story.
We dropped our gear at the HQ on the way back and slid into the Oak Creek Canyon stretch toward Sedona, which I'm loving more every time we drive it. And then — a new wildfire, just kicking up. We'd find out more about that one soon enough.
🎬 "Little Hollywood"
Sedona's film history runs deep. The first movie shot here was the 1923 silent Western Call of the Canyon, based on the Zane Grey novel and filmed right in Oak Creek Canyon — it put the red rocks on the national map and kicked off a run of nearly 100 feature films. The John Wayne picture was Angel and the Badman (1947), shot in front of Coffee Pot Rock. Joan Crawford, Henry Fonda, Elvis, Gene Autry, and Robert De Niro all filmed here in the golden era.
🏙️ How Sedona Got Its Name
One of the best small-town origin stories going. T.C. Schnebly came from Missouri in 1901, wanted a post office, and submitted "Oak Creek Crossing" and "Schnebly Station" — both rejected as too long for a cancellation stamp. His brother suggested using the name of T.C.'s wife instead: Sedona. Approved June 26, 1902, with the post office running out of the back of their house. And the name itself? Sedona's mother simply made it up because she thought it sounded pretty. It did. It does.
Our guide — Karen, who was fantastic — dropped us back in town. We wandered down to La Vecina for great food and a new beer: a Spellbinder IPA out of a Phoenix microbrewery. Karen had also given us the deeper vortex download, all the inflow and outflow business, which we'd been chewing on ever since. We strolled a bit, then headed back to the hotel, cleaned up, and finished the night the right way — a glass of wine on the rooftop deck under the stars. Sleep soon. Day two of Aimeeland, in the books.
Day 3 — Saturday, June 20: Bell Rock & the Vortexes
Bell Rock — Lizard Energy and Bird Energy
A slow, good start. Morning meditation and rooftop coffee, running a touch behind and not caring. Then we bounced out to the Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte area for the five-mile loop.
This is where Aimeeland tipped fully into the mystical. Aimee felt something out there — a real energy. She got dizzy. She swore the talus slope was sliding up toward the cliff face. And she said she had lizard energy — she could spot every single lizard in the desert, like they were lighting up for her. I didn't feel what she felt, and that's fine. But I had my own version: bird energy. I was seeing every bird on the trail, and they were telling me things. What things, I couldn't tell you. But the message was being sent.
🦎🐦 What Could It Mean?
Bell Rock is considered an upflow (masculine) vortex — energy spiraling up out of the Earth, often described as invigorating, like a current moving upward through the body. Dizziness is one of the most commonly reported sensations there. The talus-slope movement has a tidy geological explanation too: heat shimmer off dark basalt at 90 degrees creates genuine optical flow, and your inner ear and eyes get fooled together. As for the animals — in Southwest traditions, lizard carries heightened perception, the gift of seeing what others miss; and birds as messengers is nearly universal. Aimee tuning into lizard while I tuned into bird, at the same vortex, on the same morning, is the most Aimeeland thing that could possibly have happened.
We hit the trailhead at 7:30 and it was nearly full already, but we dropped most of the crowd quickly and took the loop counterclockwise — which, if I'm remembering the vortex etiquette right, is the direction that releases energy. Around we went, plenty of water, red rocks blazing, the whole thing just spectacular. Off the trail by 9:30 with the temperature already pushing 90 at the trailhead.
🏔️ Who Was Munds?
We hiked the Munds Mountain Wilderness this morning — 18,150 acres in the Coconino's Red Rock Ranger District, established in 1984, with Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte right at its edge. The name belongs to a genuine pioneer family: William Munds, born in Kentucky in 1835, drove cattle from Oregon to the Verde Valley in 1876 and became Jerome's first mayor. His son Jim used to push herds through this exact red rock country up toward what's now Munds Park — the old Munds Wagon Trail. So the wilderness we walked carries the name of a cattle-driving family whose herds crossed these rocks 130 years ago.
Back to the hotel for breakfast before cleanup and massages. And the dichotomy was almost funny — from raw wilderness, lizard energy and moving talus, straight back to the polished calm of the resort. We checked the Pocket Fire: 500 acres now, up from 100. We saw that thing more or less light up yesterday as we came down the canyon. We got out just ahead of it. As our guide put it, it's not a matter of if a fire hits Sedona — it's when. People here take that seriously, and after watching it grow, so do we.
Cheeto
Our legs, after that trail, were absolutely coated in red dust — head-to-toe like we'd been digging through a bag of Cheetos. We looked dirty, we smelled dirty, and Aimee took one look at me and christened it: "Cheeto." My new trail name. Earned honestly, on a vortex hike at Bell Rock in 90-degree heat. It's official now. It's in the journal. There's no taking it back.
🧡 Why the Cheeto Legs
That's the iron oxide in the Coconino and Supai sandstone — the same mineral that makes the rocks glow red transfers happily onto skin, socks, and everything else. For a couple of hours this morning, we were technically part of the local geology.
The Massage, and the Airport Mesa Vortex
The massage deserves its own paragraph. Ninety minutes, deep tissue, a guy named Oscar who walked me through every imbalance in my legs in detail. And the spa itself was built to feel like you were getting worked on inside Antelope Canyon — curved, glowing, sculpted walls. Aimee said it was one of the best massages she's ever had. Total win.
After that, lunch at Tres Amigos in West Sedona — solid veggie burritos. We watched the Germany match (we were pulling for Ivory Coast; didn't happen). Then back up to Airport Mesa for another vortex, where we hiked around and watched the helicopters running sorties on the Pocket Fire. Honestly it looked expensive for what it accomplished — a few buckets against all that — but you want them up there trying.
Downtown, and the Crystal Catastrophe
Back downtown, we hit Sedona Brewing Company and got into the trip's best tap list. Their beer names read like they were written for us: Where's The Vortex (a Hazy DIPA you simply had to order after a morning at the Bell Rock vortex), Unsupervised Children (an accurate description of our last three days), and Magnificent Vistas (brewed with Vista hops, earned after Bell Rock and Antelope Canyon). We ran into the Capstone private firefighters in there too — the hired guns of the fire world, here for the Pocket Fire.
Then some shop strolling, which produced the day's slapstick climax. In one of those very expensive shops — the high-end crystal-and-mineral places, crystal skulls and chakra stones under glass — a Botox-and-sunglasses type set her coffee and her bag down on a display case, and the entire thing came crashing down. Total chaos, everyone buzzing. I quietly stepped away from the anxiety crystals I'd been examining. There is something deeply funny about a roomful of people surrounded by healing chakra minerals all instantly losing their composure. The crystals did not, apparently, help.
Then back to the hotel, the way you do. The rooftop deck had one more trick in it. We got fixated on the Starlink satellites again, trying to decode the pattern — it looked like a giant triangle, or a whole series of triangles marching across the sky. And the air up there was so bone-dry that we started shocking each other. Not gentle little zaps either — Aimee let loose one aggressive discharge that damn near caught my shirt on fire. At one point I managed to shock my own belly. And of course "Shock the Monkey" was still running on a loop in my head, two nights straight now, which felt less like coincidence and more like the trip insisting on its own soundtrack. We finally peeled ourselves off the deck, electrified, and went down to unwind before bed. Quite a day.
Day 4 — Sunday, June 21: Summer Solstice
The longest day of the year, and the last day of Aimeeland. Fitting that the trip got the most daylight the calendar can offer to wind itself down.
We were up early for one final hike — out on the Adobe Jack trail at 6:30, a quiet out-and-back before the heat and before the day got complicated. And it turned out we threaded the needle one more time: as we came off the trail, we saw the sign. Adobe Jack was being closed, part of a massive Forest Service lockdown sweeping across the north and northwest side of town because of the fire. We'd gotten the last hike in, almost literally, before the grid went dark behind us. The same luck that got us out of the canyon ahead of the flames on Day 2 held all the way to the final morning.
🔥 The Pocket Fire — The Through-Line
The fire we watched start from the canyon on Day 2 became the quiet spine of this whole trip. It began as a curiosity — a plume up the canyon as we drove back from Page. By Day 3 it was 500 acres and we were watching helicopters bucket it from the Airport Mesa vortex. By the solstice it had grown into a full Federal Type 2 incident: ~500 acres, 0% containment, burning in the Red Rock–Secret Mountain Wilderness near East Pocket, seven miles north of town. Crews cut a dozer line on the upper eastern edge to protect Oak Creek Canyon; five helicopters flew out of Sedona Airport. "GO" evacuation orders covered the Oak Creek Canyon corridor and West Fork, with a shelter set up at Sedona Red Rock High School. SR 89A was closed in both directions for 23 miles between North Sedona and I-17 near Flagstaff — the exact stretch we'd driven two days earlier — with no reopening estimate. A huge grid of trailheads went down with it: Boynton Canyon, Bear Mountain, Fay Canyon, Long Canyon, Soldier Pass, Sugarloaf, Adobe Jack, and more.
The private asset-protection crews we'd run into at Sedona Brewing — contractors hired by high-end insurers like Chubb and PURE to clear brush and spray protective gels around insured homes under Forest Service coordination — were part of this same machine. Our guide's words kept landing harder: it's not if a fire hits Sedona, it's when. We happened to be there for a when, and we got to watch the whole apparatus of a modern Western wildfire response spin up around us — while never once being in danger ourselves. A strange, vivid gift of a backdrop for a getaway.
Back at the hotel, breakfast at Forty1 delivered one last small delight: we discovered they have a full vegan menu, which neither of us had clocked all weekend. That plus a lot of coffee made for a perfect, unhurried final meal at the forty-first and final piece of the puzzle. Then cleanup, one last creekside moment in Room 10, and checkout at 11.
On the way out of town we stopped at the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which was genuinely striking — a modernist chapel built right into the red rock, well worth the pause. And then Aimeeland gave us one last gift on the drive: Aimee suddenly started shouting "There's Snoopy! There's Snoopy!", pointing up at the rock above us — and sure enough, there it was. Snoopy Rock, the formation that really does look exactly like Snoopy lying on his back on top of his doghouse. She was insistent — take a picture, take a picture — so we did. Then off down the highway and out of Aimeeland.
🐶 Snoopy Rock
It's a real, named formation on the Sedona skyline, part of the Camel Head formation east of town — and the resemblance is uncanny: Snoopy flat on his back atop his doghouse, nose pointed skyward. Once you see it you can't unsee it. A perfect, goofy, joyful last image for a trip that never stopped handing us things to look at.
☀️ Summer Solstice
We left Sedona on the June solstice — the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun reaching its highest and northernmost point. There's a nice symmetry to it: a trip steeped in energy, vortexes, dark skies, and literal sparks flying off our own skin, ending on the day the Earth tips most fully toward the light. Sedona, a town that markets itself on cosmic alignment, sending us off on the most astronomically charged day of the year. Aimeeland wouldn't have it any other way.
The drive down to Phoenix was easy — a few small traffic backups, nothing more. We slid into the Delta lounge at Terminal 3 with about an hour to spare. TSA Touch ID was seamless, faster than SEA. A Lagunitas IPA in hand, a broader IPA recon mission underway, and the quiet satisfaction of a trip that went exactly the way you'd want one to go.
I kept thinking of the Midnight Oil song "Gadigal Land" — that "-land" naming instinct, naming a place for what it means and who it belongs to. This one belonged to Aimee from the first red rock she laid eyes on. Aimeeland.
And then the trip gave us one final, perfect coda. First class home — doing it right, both directions — and as the plane climbed out, our flight path took us directly over Sedona. We looked down and there they were: Aimee's vortex rocks, the whole red rock basin laid out beneath us. Bell Rock, Airport Mesa, Cathedral, the canyon — the entire stage of the last four days, visible all at once from 30,000 feet. We'd hiked them, felt their energy, gotten dizzy and shocked and Cheeto-dusted among them, and now we got to see the whole map of Aimeeland in a single glance on the way out. You couldn't script a better goodbye.
We landed home, unpacked the suitcases, got the laundry going, and sat there trying to remember our work passwords for Monday morning — the surest sign a vacation is truly over. Time for sleep on this longest day of the year.
The Cast of Aimeeland — Final Roll Call
- 🦎Aimee — lizard energy, Bell Rock vortex
- 🐦Cheeto (me) — bird-messenger energy, Bell Rock vortex (the regular kind of big bird energy, not the large yellow one)
- 🌪️The dust devils — vortex through polarized glass, Page highway
- 🐦The hummingbird — circling poolside at Forty1
- ⚡The static shocks — our own personal vortexes, rooftop deck, two nights running
Aimeeland delivered. Every single day. First class out, first class home, red rocks in between, and a wildfire writing its own dramatic margin notes the whole way. We did it right.
Welcome to Aimeeland —
where the red rock runs to the river,
where lizard walks with bird,
where the dark sky spills its stars.
Hers from the first red cliff.
Welcome to Aimeeland.
With a nod to Midnight Oil's "Gadigal Land" for the cadence.
Beer Log — Sedona, June 2026
Brooks ("Cheeto") & Aimee · Sedona, Arizona · June 18–21, 2026