Sedona(ish)

While in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, we took a day trip to the Sedona area (then I drove a group of people on to the Grand Canyon from there, but that's for a future post). Sedona is a cute little desert/mountain town, but the real highlight is the natural beauty surrounding it on all sides.

Arizona in general has such interesting rock formations and unique mountainous terrain, and Sedona was no exception. Apparently the area is especially known for its red rocks, and it lived up to the reputation because man, there were a lot of red rocks.

We went to Red Rock State Park and walked around for a while. The park itself wasn't that great, but it had a great view of various red rock formations in the distance. It was a beautiful, blue-sky day, so the red rocks contrasted really nicely with the sky and made for a beautiful walk! I don't really love pictures I took there, but oh well. How do you balance setting up cool landscape pictures while walking around and being social with family/friends? That's a balance that I haven't quite figured out yet haha.

Here are a few pictures from Red Rock State Park:

Cathedral Rock

Wet Water (Also, my first time messing around with an ND filter. They're funky!)

More Red Rocks

After walking around at Red Rock State Park for a while, a vanload of us split off from the rest of the group to go to the Grand Canyon for the rest of the day. It was around a 2 hour drive from Phoenix to Sedona, and we had another 2.5 hours to go to get to the Grand Canyon. The drive north out of Sedona on 89A is absolutely gorgeous. If you ever get the chance to drive it you're in for a real treat! There are huge rock formations and cliffs that come right up to the highway, and at times we were just totally surrounded by steep, looming rocks on all sides. It's absolutely incredible how much the terrain varies between Sedona and the Grand Canyon. It felt like every 10 miles we would reach a totally different area with different plants and rock formations/colors than the last 10 miles had. Somehow the 7 other people in the van fell asleep for most of the drive, but I was totally entranced by the landscape all around me and could barely keep my eyes on the road a lot of the time.

Along the way we stopped at a scenic overlook, and that's where these last couple pictures are from. This is like 30 miles north of Sedona and as you can see the landscape looks totally different! We had risen in elevation so there were already a lot more trees and greenery.

Mr. Lookout

Valley Drive (If you look really closely in the valley, you can 89A which is where we had just come from)

In a future post, on to the Grand Canyon!