PHOENIX & SEDONA
Back in March, just before the pandemic fully hit the US, I went out to Arizona with my usual travel buddy, Shae, who had never been there. My aunt and uncle live in Phoenix, and I’ve been there to visit them twice before, with eight-year gaps in between these three trips. I have always loved it: the landscape, the colors, the weather and dry heat (though I’ve never been out there in the summer, only between February and April!), all so different than the east coast.
Our trip ended up being quite surreal, usually driving in the middle of nowhere while the country started to talk about closures that would become a lockdown, and there’s no way to separate or ignore that element of the trip. We left from the oddly empty JFK just as travel was dropping off, and later had a tense and crowded flight back to NYC, which felt different than the city we’d left less a week before. Though things were mostly business as usual in Arizona, I did spend a lot of the trip reading the news and rumors whenever I had cell service or hotel wifi, talking to my coworkers about the theater shutdown and work from home, and figuring out my post-trip plans.
Even though it was a surreal and sometimes stressful trip — and one I look back on with complicated feelings and disbelief that it was this year — it was also a wonderful trip. We were socially distanced pretty much the whole time, out in the Arizona (and, unexpectedly, Utah) desert, and could just enjoy beautiful places. I’m grateful to have had a trip this year before any prospect of travel this year was wiped away, and I’m glad to have photos to look back on.
I decided to only bring my film camera for this trip, not wanting to drag two cameras around and shoot with both. After shooting film in Paris and London last year, I wanted to try a trip with just film, and I knew Arizona would be great on film — I actually shot one of my first rolls of film ever in Arizona, in 2012. The whole trip was photographed on Portra 400.
We got into Phoenix very late at night and slept in a bit in the morning, so we didn’t get an early start, but we spent the afternoon at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. It started to rain right when we pulled into the parking lot, and it rained on and off while we walked around. We definitely had not thought we would need an umbrella while in Arizona, but this was only the beginning of our bad luck with weather on this trip. Despite the rain, the garden was really nice, and it was cool to see so many desert plants there.
Later in the day, we drove up to Sedona, with very ominous clouds over the scenic route.
It was rainy, cloudy, and foggy in Sedona, the opposite of the bright sky, sun, and colors I had seen the last time I went there. How rare are rain and fog in Sedona? Although the weather wasn’t ideal, it was actually sort of cool and interesting to see the trails and views in the unusual weather. After breakfast, we started with the Devil’s Bridge hike. We started at the Dry Creek Road parking lot and Chuckwagon trailhead, which connects to the Devil’s Bridge trail. The first part of our hike was a bit wet, with drizzle and light rain coming and going, but it had tapered off once we were on the Devil’s Bridge trail. The sun was finally out by the time we got higher up the trail and arrived at the top, turning a corner and suddenly able to see the “bridge.” Devil’s Bridge is a large arch wide enough to walk out on, high above the ground — the walk isn’t as bad as it looks from the side.
We hiked back down and over to the car, then headed out for some shorter stops. First, we went to the Airport Mesa. It’s just down the road from the Sedona Airport Scenic Lookout, where you can watch the sunset, as I did on my previous trip. The climb up to the Airport Mesa vortex is quick and easy, and you get fantastic 360 views at the top. It was incredibly windy this time, and we felt like we were going to be blown over, so we unfortunately didn’t spend too much time up there. Next, we went to see the Chapel of the Holy Cross, a church built into the rock, and the rain started back up.
While it rained, we went into a couple of shops and got some warm drinks (another thing we really didn’t expect to need in Arizona in the spring), and caught a rainbow when the rain broke again. Then we headed out of Sedona, driving north to the Grand Canyon. The drive out of Sedona, route 89A, was so scenic and beautiful, and it almost felt like we were suddenly in another region, not the desert. We stopped in Flagstaff for dinner at MartAnne’s; it was snowing there, just as it had eight years when I went to the exact same place. The Grand Canyon was our plan for day three, so we stayed overnight just outside the park.
