The Secrets of Sedona's Red Rocks

NOT MANY YEARS AGO, RED ROCK COUNTRY IN CENTRAL ARIZONA

Was familiar to only a few who reveled in its mild winters, hidden canyons and dramatically sculpted rocks. Today, however, it seems everyone knows about Sedona and the red rocks.

On any given day, the area has as many visitors as residents, who number more than 10,000. Answering the seductive call of red sandstone, dozens of sightseers clamber up the irresistible slickrock slopes of Bell Rock each afternoon. Hundreds more snap photos of red rocks shaped like castles, critters and kitchen implements. And every couple of months or so, one or two need to be plucked from Capitol Butte or have cactus spines plucked from them at the local clinic. It's the red rocks, some people say. Who could resist the whimsy of places named Rabbit Ears or Merry-Go-Round, or the majesty and mystery of a Cathedral Rock? Or the simple power of raw beauty? In any case, the secret is out.

Or is it? After all, how can anyone ever truly know a place so complex?

This jewel within jewels lies between the Verde Valley, Sycamore Canyon and the Mogollon Rim, two hours north of Phoenix. Though only 500 square miles in size, Red Rock Country is big enough to take your breath away. Steal your heart. Capture your imagination. And, just when you think you know it, surprise you again and again, as yet another secret is revealed. Even on the most popular of trails, along

the meandering West Fork of Oak Creek or among the dazzling spires of Boynton Canyon, it's possible to find peace, to connect with nature and to reconnect with oneself. After all, to really know a place requires understanding and intimacy-not just of a place but also of your place within it. To paraphrase John Muir-the naturalist, conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club -how better to find oneself than by getting lost in the beauty of canyons, mesas, forests and creeks? Much of Red Rock Country is public land, part of the Coconino National Forest, three wilderness areas and two state parks. Canyons extend like fingers from the Mogollon Rim, which forms the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. One, the

canyon of Oak Creek, cuts through a 2,500foot geological layer cake on its 12-mile length, revealing the power and majesty of a living, changing Earth. For more than 300 million years, this land has been shaped by oceans, deserts, swamps and volcanic flows.

Most of the area's castlelike buttes and spires are carved from the Schnebly Hill Formation, a 700-foot-thick series of four mudstone, sandstone and limestone members, subunits of the formation, in shades of dark red, orange and gray. The gray Fort Apache limestone member forms a hard cap that protects lower, softer layers of rock, leaving natural forces to weather shapes that tease the imagination.

Coconino sandstone, formed from ancient windblown sand dunes, rises above the reddish layers in tilted stacks of buff and gold, topping the taller landforms like Capitol Butte and Munds Mountain. The tallest form, Wilson Mountain, is crowned with basalt laid down by a volcanic eruption 8 million years ago.

Fissures, seams and seeps in the sandstone layers sometimes slough off slabs of rock, forming chimneys, sharp corners, flat faces-even arches, such as Devils Bridge. This complex landscape remains a work in progress, as anyone who's hiked past the recent rockfall in Fay Canyon can attest. Here, car-sized chunks of stone have buried shrubs, trees and part of the hiking trail.

Hidden canyons and sunny slopes create a range of microclimates within eight different plant communities. More than 500 types of plants live from the desert grassland below Bell Rock to the pine-fir forest atop 7,000-foot Wilson Mountain. The crystalline spring-fed waters of Oak Creek create a lush riparian area of wondrous variety, where blackberry bushes and golden columbines

Getting to know RED ROCK COUNTRY isn't necessarily about putting in miles. It's more about collecting MOMENTS.(Continued from page 29) tangle beneath the spreading branches of Arizona sycamores. Piñon-juniper woodland predominates in high, dry Red Rock Country, with an understory chaparral of manzanita, catclaw and other pricklies that persuades hikers to stay on trails.

Wildlife varies with the terrain, including some 35 different types of snakes, lizards and amphibians; 20 or more varieties of fish; 55 kinds of mammals; 180 birds; and thousands of insects and invertebrates. Raucous Steller's jays haunt the ponderosa forest of upper Oak Creek Canyon, while their scrub jay cousins fly around town. Ringtails, mergansers, great blue herons and other riparian animal species can be spotted along Oak Creek, but rattlesnakes, jackrabbits and Quail call the dry desert grassland home. Coyotes, supremely adaptive, feel at home everywhere, forest and city, serenading the sunset or the sirens of emergency vehicles. Shy mammals, such as mountain lions and black bears, are rarely seen, though sharpeyed hikers often observe signs of their passing in backcountry areas like Dry Creek Basin.

Red Rock Country rates as a hiker's paradise. Maintained forest-system trails number more than 60 and cover 160-plus miles, ranging from short-but-sweet Allen's Bend, a half-mile stroll along Oak Creek, to the 5-mile climb up Wilson Mountain. Another 50 or so trails pass through the "neighborwoods" near Sedona or head deep into the Munds Mountain, Sycamore Canyon or Red Rock-Secret Mountain wilderness areas.

But getting to know Red Rock Country isn't necessarily about putting in miles. It's more about collecting moments-the sweetness of a summer sunrise, when the air still feels cool but warm light slowly drips down mountaintops. Or the piercing beauty of a star-studded night sky, with only an owl's haunting call to steal into the silence. And then there is the magic created by weather, nature's alchemist.

Snowmelt in the early months of spring sends musical cascades of water down sheer sandstone cliffs. Purple and white carpets of owls clover and cream cups turn to undulating fields of gold as summer winds sear native grasses. Monsoon thunderstorms change dry washes into rock-banging rivers, Then break into brilliant sunsets with occasional rainbows. Winter snows make a fresh surface for cottontails, quail and coyotes to write their stories, as tattered veils of clouds and fog weave between the rocks.

Knowing Red Rock Country requires accepting that nothing is the same today as it was before, and that true intimacy takes time and attention.

Of course, a little luck never hurts. On a single brief hike on Jim Thompson Trail, skirting the edge of Uptown Sedona, my husband and I saw a brilliant blue-green collared lizard sunning itself on a chunk of limestone, a short-horned lizard doing its best to appear invisible on the rust-colored sand, a tarantula creeping for its burrow and-nearly lost in the twilight but for a warning buzz-a Western rattlesnake. This list does not include the things that can be experienced on nearly every summer outing: the sweet scent of a late-blooming cliffrose, ravens quorking loudly as they play catch-me along cliffs, fresh scrapes where javelinas searched for roots the night before, weirdly twisted cypress trees, balancing rocks and a variety of other sights, sounds and smells that prove how alive the forest is even in summer's dead heat.

Long before such things as computers and cars, grocery stores and movies distracted humans, we knew-really knew - this land.

More than 6,000 rock art images at Red Cliffs, a string of alcoves near the Sinagua

Indian cliff dwelling called Palatki, stand as proof that people have been drawn to the red rocks for centuries, even millennia. Layered underneath historic Yavapai Indian charcoal drawings of elk and deer are humanlike figures made by the Sinagua people, and even older markings left by archaic hunter-gatherers, precious links to the ancient past. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that paleoindians may have roamed through Red Rock Country in search of game more than 8,000 years ago.

The Sinagua, who occupied the area from roughly A.D. 650 to 1400, tucked their masonry rooms into alcoves in nearly every red rock canyon. They harvested wild plants for food, fiber and medicine, but also raised corn and other crops by ingeniously hoarding and diverting rainwater. For them, survival required knowledge of the land.

The Yavapai Indians arrived in 1300. Their legends tell of Skatakaamcha, the first Yavapai man, who came to know this land in all its guises, gentle and fierce. Raised in Boynton Canyon, he entered a rocky crevice crawling with rattlesnakes and survived to become the people's first shaman. At Bell Rock, he slew the giant monster bird that killed his mother. When he visited his father, the sun, he descended back to Earth by holding onto a rainbow.

J.J. Thompson settled in this rough, roadless country in 1876, after the Army had forced the Yavapai to leave. He and others who came later raised fruit along the creek or grazed cattle, herding them up to higher elevations in dry summer months. Some settlers lived in tent houses before building small log or stone cabins. The first two-story frame house belonged to Sedona Schnebly, a kindly woman whose name graces the town and whose door was always open to travelers. You could say she was the mother of Red Rock Country hospitality.

Small-town charm still shines through the community's increasing sophistication. A half-dozen resorts, countless tour compa nies and numerous cultural organizations offer everything from horseback rides to "vortex tours" to art festivals. Though the city of Sedona has grown rapidly, several his toric structures still stand, built of board and batten and, of course, stone. One of the finest examples of "red rock territo rial" architecture is the museum operated by the Sedona Historical Society, once the home of the Jordan family, who helped turned this rocky dry outpost into a com munity. It's a good place to learn about the long relationship between humans and this place called Red Rock Country.

But, for those of us who yearn to know more about the land and ourselves, there are the forests and trails and canyons. I call one "Deer Print Canyon" for the ephemeral pool at its head, shaped like a deer's hoof, 5 feet across. From it, water pours into a slot overgrown with sycamores.

I return here once or twice a year, reluctant to leave a trace by coming more often, hopeful that others who know of it share the ethic of traveling lightly. For me, this small canyon holds the essence of Red Rock Country-sweeping benches of reddish stone, moist stands of cypress, pygmy forests of juniper and manzanita, ruins and rock art, mountain lion tracks and bear scat, and that ineffable something that restores the spirit.

Pockets like this exist throughout the red rocks, some well known, some I hope yet to discover. Still others I hope will always elude me, for who wants to know every thing, when mystery is part of the allure and the journey is an end in itself? Alhe word spider derives from an Old English word meaning “to spin,” and so we tend to think of all spiders as web spinners. Ingeniously designed, often incredibly complex, spiderwebs become shelters, egg sacs or snares to entrap and kill prey. There are sheet webs, with mooring lines that deflect flying insects onto the webs' center, or trap lines that secure a prey insect by a single filament until its helpless flailing entangles it hopelessly in the main frame.

SHARPEYED HUNTER ON THE PROWL green lynx Spider

There are funnel webs, purse webs and orb webs; webs of sticky silk or woolly fuzz, equally lethal in snaring and holding prey; and webs so messily scrambled they appear to have been spun by slightly addled spiders.

Yet, many spiders do not spin webs to snare prey. Burrowing spiders dig narrow tunnels capped with thin lids, then lie in wait for small prey to blunder fatally near the trapdoor. Equipped with supersensitive hearing, some burrowing spiders can detect an insect walking on the ground above, and rush out to seize the prey. Other spiders, such as the crab spider that conceals itself behind my bathroom mirror, wait in ambush to pounce upon their prey.

I love spiders. I love their stealth, the intri cacy of their webs, the stronger-than-steel resilience of their silk, the variety of their size, shape and coloration. Among my favorites are the wandering spiders, the huntersespecially green lynx spiders. Hunters don't build webs to snare prey. Water spiders are wandering spiders, as are the wolf, crab and the Apache jumping spiders, small brightorange spiders with green jaws that hunt among leaves of desert plants.

Night-hunting spiders and those that trap prey in webs, trapdoors or similar pitfalls depend on touch, not vision, to sense and catch prey, so their eyes tend to be relatively small. Wandering spiders, on the other hand, with fairly large eyes, rely on keen eyesight to spot prey and stalk it before moving in for the kill. Within this category, I'm drawn to some small, agile, sharp-eyed daytime hunters, the jumping spiders and lynx spiders, particularly the beauti-fully colored, slender green lynx spider.

One afternoon not long ago, I saw one on a bush in photographer Marty Cordano's garden. Actually, I didn't see it. Cordano saw it and tried to direct my eyes to it, but I still couldn't see it. So Cordano moved his index finger very slowly along a bright green leaf to within perhaps 6 inches of the spider's position. “Now do you see it?” he asked.

Finally, the little spider flinched and I did see it, but it wasn't easy, as it nearly perfectly blended with the background foliage. The spider's head moved slightly in order to face Cordano's finger. Cordano waggled his finger. The green spider sidled back on its eight legs and, standing firm on its leafy perch, fixed the object in its path with its two main headlamp-style eyes.

The slender, oval-shaped spider, not much more than three-quarters of an inch long, was bright green with rows of tiny red spots on its abdomen and thorax.

This green lynx spider's most arresting feature was its eyes, which eventually fixed upon me as steadfastly in my direction as my gaze upon it. Appropriately, the name of the spider family that the green lynx belongs to is Oxyopidae, Latin for “sharp-eyed.” The green lynx, in its miniature world, has the vision equivalent of a hawk. It can detect prey up to a foot away, give or take A couple of inches. But it is not likely to respond much until that distance is halved. Thus, the female green lynx we observed in Cordano's garden did not react to his finger sliding toward her along the leaf until it came within 6 inches. If the finger had been, say, a grasshopper, the green lynx may have begun to stalk her prey. And had she been able to sneak within a quarter inch of it, she would have pounced upon it quickly, lynxlike.

After the catch, the green lynx quickly subdues its prey with a bite of immobilizing venom. Then it regurgitates some digestive fluid and injects it into the grasshopper. These juices liquify the prey insect's insides, which the green lynx then sucks out, a process that may continue for several hours. Gradually, the grasshopper is reduced to a husk.

Cordano ran his forefinger right up next to her and gently poked at her. Normally the spider would have fled, leaping from leaf to leaf. “I'll bet she's guarding an egg sac somewhere nearby,” Cordano said.

We turned over a few leaves and, sure enough, found a wheat-colored egg sac lashed to the underside of a leaf with silken threads. This maze of lines running to adjacent leaves represents the only spinning done by the green lynx. When the young hatch, they will remain within this silky refuge until they are old enough to fend for themselves and stalk their own prey. All