Hiking West Fork Oak Creek Canyon

It's been 15 years since we've been to Sedona, and even when we were last there, we didn't have a chance to do some of the more interesting hikes.  So, since we're only a 45 minute drive or so from Oak Creek Canyon, we decided to do the very popular hike of the West Fork of Oak Creek Canyon.

The hike is so popular that the trailhead parking lot is full by 9:00 am.  So we decided to leave our campground at 6:30 am in order to arrive at the parking lot by 7:30.  That was successful, but to our surprise, the gate to the parking lot didn't open until 8:00.  We got lucky, however, and a car in one of three spots on the outside of the gate decided to leave rather than wait for it to open.  We thought the young people must not have realized they could park there, self-pay the fee, and start hiking.  But we did.  We pulled into their spot, self-payed the fee, and started hiking.  Occupants of two other cars in the spots outside the gate saw what we were doing and asked us if it was okay.  We told them we thought so, so they made haste to get hiking too.  We started down the trail ahead of them, but they passed us quickly enough.  It was an out-and-back hike.  Our hike in was probably our slowest hike on record:  4.6 miles in 3 hours.  Kathy suggested it was because David stopped so many times to take photos, but we're not sure.

Anyway, here's David at the trailhead, with one of those beautiful cliffs in the background, beckoning us into the canyon:

We were surprised to find that the first part of the trail took us through the ruins of the Mayhew Lodge:

The oldest structure was built by "Bear" Howard, who earned his nickname by killing four bears, supposedly armed with only a knife, in the 1870s.  The Thomas family homesteaded in the area in the 1880s. They established several orchards, many trees of which still survive --
 

-- and turned Howard's cabins into Mayhew Lodge where, decades later, western author Zane Grey wrote "The Call of the Canyon."  The movie version of the novel was filmed in the area.  Over the years, such Hollywood luminaries as Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable and Walt Disney stayed at the small lodge, which operated until 1968, when the Forest Service purchased the land. The lodge burned in 1980 and was never restored.

We've rarely hiked a trail that had so much scenery every step of the way.  In that regard, we could only compare it to Yellowstone, Glacier, Jasper, Paintbrush Canyon in the Tetons, or the Alps.  The early morning light made the cliffs glow with whatever color they had in them:

Our trail crossed the stream at least 13 times, which gave us many opportunities to catch some scenic views of the water:

Kathy was delighted to bump into one of her very old friends, Ponderosa Pine, and she greeted her with a hug:

The stream often eroded the ground down to bedrock, which was a reddish slick-rock:

But the cliffs were not just red:

Literally every turn of the trail brought us views of new and unusual rock formations --

-- or new perspectives on the creek, such as this one --

-- or this:

Sometimes the rock formations reminded us of characters from some fantasy or fairy tale:

Sometimes they were just huge, impressive peaks of solid rock:

But if we just looked up, we missed half the story.  The stream had flowed where we were hiking, and had undercut the nearby cliffs dramatically:

Sometimes the flowing water left a more unique mark on the cliffsides:

We found several caves along the way.  One, which Kathy is shown exploring here, is home to hundreds of mud sparrow nests:

As we hiked, the cliffs and peaks just kept getting higher and higher.  This one reminded us of the most dramatic we've seen in Yosemite, Zion or King's Canyon --

-- and this, too, called forth memories of Yosemite or Glacier:

Some were just plain remarkable, such as this --

 -- or this:

At about 3.3 miles, we passed the end of the maintained trail, but it is possible to hike further up the canyon as far as a total of 14 miles.  It turned out that the canyon closed in after the maintained trail, which made our immediate environment much more dramatic.  Here is a view upstream from above the maintained trail --

-- and here another photo back downstream:

The walls had been sculpted by the stream and were fascinating objects of abstract art.  Here, you can still recognize the cliff wall and stream --

-- but, here, it becomes almost pure abstraction:

Still, it's best not to forget to look up, because you might miss another dramatic rock formation.  Kathy called David's attention to this beautiful one:

And this one might rank as one of the most dramatic we saw:

But, as we sat quietly, eating our lunch, we happened to spot a deer who came down to the water for a drink.  The deer, alert to us, nevertheless didn't panic and gave us plenty of time to snap its photo:

By the time we headed back down the trail, the sun had risen high in the sky, and it tended to wash out the colors of the cliffs and peaks, so it was hard to obtain photographs as colorful and dramatic as we had snapped in the morning on our hike in.  However, we found one or two rocks we had missed on the first half of our hike.  An obliging hiker snapped our photo with this beautiful specimen:

As we hiked back, we decided to take an alternate route through one section, on the opposite bank of the stream from the section of trail we had hiked the other direction earlier in the day.  As David examined the jumbled boulders to figure out whether they fell first or the tree did, he was sure the tree settled and was going to crush him.  Don't worry David, it was just your imagination.

While photos can show the drama of individual rock formations, it's very difficult to capture the scale of the formations, or how numerous they are.  We got one video that gives you an idea how surrounded we were by geologic beauty:

We have another hike in the Sedona area tomorrow.  It is said to be beautiful, but we have a hard time believing that it can beat the West Fork of Oak Creek for awesome beauty.