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Arizona Twilight Zone

December 25, 2005

Our bug-eyed admirers

By Eve Conant, EVE CONANT, a former correspondent for Newsweek, is a writer in Sedona, Ariz.

THIS SUMMER I returned to my family home in Sedona, Ariz., to discover that the housesitter had not yet vacated the premises. He had been delayed, albeit indirectly, by aliens.

I'd been living out of town for some years and had forgotten that Sedona has for decades been an extraterrestrial meat market, where hapless believers are body-snatched and where the red rocks double as landing pads for spacecraft. For 15 years, my parents ran a bed and breakfast out of our home, and they made a fine living off the New Agers who had flocked to Sedona in droves since the early 1980s, when a prominent psychic, Page Bryant, claimed the town was home to seven vortexes of deep Earth energy — which also serve as beacons for spaceships.

Although a majority of our guests came for the views, others came to commune with the Pleiadians, Andromedans and other ETs that loitered atop the rugged buttes. One guest claimed he could channel Ashtar Command, the nice aliens, from one room, but he left for the Super 8 after it was clear the house phone would not be turned over to him for channeling sessions.

I had thought the aliens left Sedona once the developers and Californians crowded in. But the housesitter, a sandy-haired gent, informed me that the ETs are thriving, not just in town but in our family home. First, he explained, there was the oscillating vortex in the master bedroom, a minor but irritating architectural glitch we had failed to notice before asking him and his fiancee to look after the place. Without billing us, our self-reliant sitters got a half-price deal on a $700 exorcism to clear the insomnia-provoking energy field.

Then there were the Grays in the kitchen. Seven of these ashen apparatchiks of the alien world had abducted and impregnated his fiancee, he told me, and, after a two-week gestation period, stole the hybrid babies. The trauma made it hard for her to help with the cleanup; hence their delayed departure.

I think the Grays decided I'm not their type, so there have been no further incidents. Or perhaps there have been and I'm just forgetting. That's the subject of a new book by Harvard's Susan A. Clancy, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology whose research into repressed and recovered memory inspired her to write "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens" (Harvard University Press, 2005). Her diagnosis: Most "abductees" have either watched too much TV or suffered bouts of sleep paralysis, a byproduct of desynchronized sleep cycles that makes a person feel paralyzed, hear buzzing sounds and hallucinate shadowy figures.

Good luck finding Clancy's book in Sedona. "We have a lot of the 'we believe in it' books," explained one matronly bookseller. "We don't really have a debunking section." She led me past the crystals and the wind chimes to the shelf labeled "Pleiadians, UFOs and Extra-Terrestrials." I settled on a copy of "Feeling Sedona's ET Energies," by Zoosh (as channeled through Robert Shapiro, Light Technology Publishing, 2005). Zoosh advises on the best times to visit Cathedral Rock, where you can feel the vibrations of celestial broadcasts to equipment left behind when the Pleiadians pulled up their base in the 1960s.

Sedona is like many other small tourist towns, but scratch the surface and you find a very alternate reality. The other day I found a leaflet advertising Julie, a "licensed alien abduction counselor," who has "been received by the Intergalactic Space Brotherhood as an ambassador for all alien contactees." In November, I dropped in on a meeting of the Arizona chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, which rented a parish hall from St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. The lecture was on Atlantis and UFOs, and when the speaker asked the crowd of about 20 upright-seeming citizens if they'd ever been on a spaceship, four raised their hands. We watched a video of a regal-looking woman who, under hypnosis, spoke Atlantian, which to the untrained ear sounds like a cross between Basque and Mandarin.

Several locals endure nosebleeds, not from the dry altitude but from the surveillance implants. "A lot of people are faking it. The ones who've really suffered don't talk about it," explained Barry, a local 39-year-old ex-military who has suffered long nights of suspicious noises and tingling paralysis. He knew his cat, Wolfgang, had been implanted by aliens after he discovered a shaved patch with a puncture wound over his pet's heart.

One of my elderly relatives, Phyllis, liked to tell how she once had to pull off the highway between Cornville and Sedona, utterly terrorized, to scream up at the misguided operators of a spacecraft chasing her that she was a waste of their time. She was old and had "no more eggs!" for intergalactic harvesting.

A few weeks ago, I made a terrible faux pas while out for drinks with a new friend, a hipster in her 30s who works at a health food store. I told her how nice it was to talk with someone who didn't consider herself an alien. Her eyes widened; the conversation came to a screeching halt. It turns out she's a Star Person.

Perhaps, I told myself, I'm not being fair. I signed up for a card reading with a clairvoyant (15 minutes for $35) and stuck to one budget question: Had I ever been abducted by aliens? Turns out there's a good chance I have but that my memories have been erased by my captors. To get 100% accuracy, I was told I must be professionally "regressed" — a longer, more costly process.

Just for kicks last week, I asked some folks at my favorite coffeehouse, Sedona Coffee Roasters, if any of them had ever been abducted by aliens. Two of them laughed, but Hraefn, an artist who wears only black, volunteered his story: He dreamed of a spaceship with white, plasma-like tentacles. He awoke in convulsions at 3:30 a.m., the same time his neighbor saw a strange light in the sky. And no, it was not lightning.

I recall one line of Clancy's abduction book that spoke to my fondness for this town and some of its more creative inhabitants. It's about our need to believe there's something bigger and better than us out there: "Whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us."

So what if our admirers are bug-eyed and macrocephalic? Nobody's perfect.
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Source
 
TheQuixote said:
That's a great find Emps! Reminds me of the 'Skinwalker Ranch' oddity.

A Louis Lamour book IIRC I think it was one his last, called 'The Haunted Mesa' dealt with Hopi beliefs and had a portal to another world in it. I hope I'm right in saying it was relating to the Hopi's belief that their ancestors came to Earth through such a portal.
Click to expand...

Interesting you should mention that as L'Amour's book gets a mention in the Skinwalker Ranch book - I feel another thread coming on about that.

[edit: No sooner said than:

www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25325 ]

Anyway they also mention that a ranch near Sedona has been plagied by Skinwalker like activity incluidng strange lights, Sasquatch, encounters with grays, cattle and dog mutilation and a portal through which they could see another world.

All written up in:

Merging Dimensions: The Opening Portals of Sedona
Tom Dongo and Linda Bradshaw(1995)

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/09622 ... ntmagaz-21
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0962274 ... enantmc-20

---------
Oh and while it is now Apache country the Ute's original homeland covered Colorado and some of New Mexico and Arizona and includes nearly all of the major hotspots of high strangeness. I have no idea of what significance if any that has though.
 
Out There Hikes:
Navajo Alternative Realities


Navajo Alternative Realities in the Carizzo Mountains
by Craig Watson
June, 1996

More is occurring in the remote mountain and valley fastness stretched across the 25,000 square mile Navajo Reservation in northest Arizona than is normally recognized or talked about. Some events are best left to oral dissemination and not meant for all ears or all eyes. In less than a week of residing at 8500' with our Navajo weaving teacher at his family sheepcamp in the Carrizo Mts., we became aware of several issues of concern and lively discussion among the spiritually aware who live on the Navajo Reservation.

I. DIETIES AND PRAYER

Roy Kady, our Navajo weaving teacher, told us that the Navajo deities had appeared in early May, 1996, over on Rocky Ridge not far from Big Mountain. This is a particularly remote area accessed only by dirt roads northeast of Pinyon, Arizona. Big Mountain is where the Sun Dances have been held recently, basically in the middle of nowhere, although a lot of this nowhere seems to be alive and well in the 4-Corners.

As Roy told us, an elderly woman takes care of her blind mother in Rocky Ridge. On this particular day her blind mother asked her if the visitors had come yet. The daughter knew of no expected visitors. However, after the mother asked her daughter the fourth time, a strong but calming wind blew into the house.

The daughter moved out of the house to see 2 figures appear in front of her. She knelt down in front of them, looking up the taller white figure first, then the second smaller turquoise being. After that she kept her eyes on their feet. They said, "We can no longer distinguish the Navajo from the other people. The Navajo are no longer praying or performing their sacred ceremonies anymore and therefore we cannot help you."

The deities told the daughter, "Tell everyone to go back to the ancient ways of prayer and worship to avoid disaster. Some will not believe you but you must tell them." The only physical evidence of their presence were small moccasin prints left by the Turquoise deity. The white deity was drifting just above the earth and leaft only dusty but larger impressions in the earth.

Could they have been the two main aspects of Changing Woman: the youthful White Shell (or White Bead) Woman and the mature great goddess, Changing Woman (Turquoise Woman)? The deities told the woman, "We will return and take someone with us."

This message was spread by word of mouth gradually. Our teacher, Roy, heard it a week later in his hometown of Teec Nos Pos, located in the northeasternmost corner of Arizona. He travelled to the manifestation site and assisted on the Saturday following the visitation. Little was in the press regarding this event, although the Farmington, NM newspaper did mention these supernatural phenomena in one article we read while at Teec Nos Pos in June. Since then, we have read reference to this supernatural event in the Canyon Echo (Bluff, UT) and the Navajo Times (Window Rock, AZ).

As a consequence of the appearance of these 2 deities, the entire Navajo Nation declared an hour of prayer and unity on Thursday, June 20 1996 at 1:30 pm. We were in our fifth day of weaving Navajo rugs at the sheepcamp when that hour approached. Roy stopped his activity and sat cross legged in his cabin to face east at 1:30.

He turned on his radio and accompanied the Navajo speaker in chanting a 20+ minute prayer while making offerings of corn pollen from his great-grandfather's Navajo wedding basket. Following this traditional Navajo spiritual ceremony, a Native American Church prayer followed, and then a Christian one, the three prayers taking about 70 minutes in all. This prayer hour had been announced in all the newspapers and on the radios. The Navajo Nation government employees were given the afternoon off work, and everyone else was urged to stop whatever they were doing and participate.

The entire 4-Corners is in the grips of a severe drought, the worst in memory as reported in local newspapers. But the Navajo ceremony worked and rains came just after the end of that hour. The skies darkened, clouds roiled above us, the winds shrieked and rain fell in spurts. A heavy hailstorm raked the sheepcamp in slashes. Gusts must have reached 50 mph. This weather continued well into the night and the next morning when we packed up and departed, hustled down off that mountain by tailstorms. The remains of a Mexican hurricane dumped rain on the 4-Corners after we left.

We have learned through an article in the June 27 issue of the Navajo Times newspaper that June 18 will henceforth be comemmorated as a day of prayer for the Navajo Nation. This date was chosen because it was that day in 1868 that the Navajo people were released from prison camp at Fort Sumner (Bosque Redondo), New Mexico to begin their 200-mile walk west to their ancestral homeland . Four years earlier, during the Winter of 1864, the Navajos' infamous Long Walk to Fort Sumner from their traditional lands was imposed by the U.S. government and enforced by Kit Carson. This Long Walk and subsequent imprisonment caused many to die of disease and starvation when they were exposed to and unprotected from the Winter weather.

II. UFO's

Roy has seen strange objects flying in the sky above the sheepcamp. He said they usually appear in the same area of the sky midday when it is very clear. Lately he has taken to viewing them through binoculars obtained for this purpose. They appear disc-shaped. Their flight characteristics are unlike anything else ever observed. Once he observed 2 of them together. He told me that one of my former weaving teachers had a close encounter with one near the ground as she was driving west with someone from Shiprock, NM to Teec Nos Pos 2 years ago.

In the Spring of 1994, cattle were found disemboweled up in the Carrizo Mts. Their organs appeared to have been surgically removed and the carcasses were found scattered far apart. Through word of mouth, the Navajo cattlemen determined that many of them had found some of their cattle like this. This has happened once before, about 5 years ago. We observed three such carcasses during our visit. The hides and bones remained, along with some organic matter.

Similar findings were reported out of Oregon in the Spring of 1994 and on the earlier occasion. I have not been able to independently verify that. I was informed of these other happenings by a friend who said that in the Oregon cases, the cattle were missing an ear and eye in addition to certain organs. The surgery had been performed cleanly. While the incisions appeared to have the precision of laser cutting, no burned edges were observed which would have resulted from lasers. I do recall reading about such events in the press or magazines some years ago. The Navajos appear to take these events in stride and do not publicize them as far as I know.

If extraterrestial visitations are occurring in the Carrizo Mts. and others mountains nearby, I would not be surprised since it so remote and unpopulated in these areas.

III. CONCLUSIONS

I have no conclusions other than to say that the dividing line between normal concensus reality and alternative realities becomes blurred when one is so removed from "normal" stimuli. One has the feeling that anything is possible in these remote tracts.
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www.indianweaving.com/navajo.html
 
April 9, 2006

In Search of the Vortex Vibe in Sedona

By DWIGHT GARNER

ON a late afternoon in Sedona, with the sinking sun beaming a powdery light over the mustard-red buttes, spires and mesas that surround the city like the ruins of fortress walls, everything looks better than good. Even the scenes that are banished from the postcards — the time-share developments, the trinket shops, the clusters of poky tourists — pick up an otherworldly glow. Those paunchy and ponytailed local hippies? All of a sudden, they're glamorous: it's as if they've been lit by Annie Leibovitz for a Rolling Stone cover circa 1978.

A few years ago, USA Today called Sedona the most beautiful place in America. At sundown, that doesn't begin to cover it. And it's not just the views. There's a vibe in the air, something not quite audible, a kind of metaphysical dog whistle that calls people out to have a look around and to try to feel something that, if you're not a committed New-Age pilgrim, is hard to put into words. Nowhere else in this country does a natural setting feel so much like the inside of a soaring pantheistic cathedral.

I wanted to feel something, too, even though — full disclosure — I lack the spiritual gene. I now have proof of this. I had my "aura" photographed in Sedona. It's a good city for doing things like that. There are more places here to buy crystals, incense and healing stones than there are places to purchase, say, a bag of ice or a hammer. The friendly man who read my "aura colors" told me, for $47, what I pretty much already knew: that I'm a little bit stressed-out and that I don't believe in much of anything (beyond the value of a cold dry martini before dinner). Many thanks, amigo.

Somewhat inexplicably, though, I found myself on my first evening in Sedona standing on a hill called Mystic Vista, taking in the mind-bending views and trying to soak up some "vortex" energy. Sedona is famous for its so-called vortex sites, spots where the earth's energy is supposedly increased, leading to self-awareness and various kinds of healing. (Think of them as spiritual hot tubs without the water.)

I'd taken a New Age jeep tour with a company called Earth Wisdom. Four of us leapt out of the jeep and made the short hike up to Mystic Vista: me, a sixtyish guide named Larry Sprague and two long-haired seekers, a husband and wife from Arkansas. Once we were up there, we did some things that embarrassed me. Mr. Sprague hugged a tree. We all dowsed. In hushed tones, Mr. Sprague told us about ancient Native American rituals and the vision quests he'd been on.

I wasn't feeling the vortex vibes, or much of anything else. But at sundown, the guy from Arkansas brought out a drum and starting tapping on it, Iron John-style. As if on cue, Larry-the-tour-guide pulled out a wooden flute and began accompanying him, playing cryptic Native American-inspired riffs. Anyplace else, this improvised duet would have made me flee back down the mountain. Up here, it sounded surprisingly groovy. It was a Sedona moment. I felt like I'd arrived.

THE whole history of America after the Civil War, Alfred Kazin once wrote, paraphrasing the essayist John Jay Chapman, can be condensed like this: it's "the story of a railroad passing through a town, and then dominating it." In the recent history of Sedona, that dominating railroad has sometimes seemed to have been a kind of star-spangled, Robert Altmanesque New Age parade.

It arrived here in force in 1987. That was the year of the Harmonic Convergence when believers flocked to mystical places across the planet, hoping for a global awakening of harmony and love. Some 5,000 of these believers crammed into Sedona. (It may or may not be a coincidence that Stevie Nicks was born only two hours away.) A few hundred of them stood in front of a formation called Bell Rock, waiting for its lid to open and reveal a U.F.O.

No flying saucer emerged, but word about this place began to spread.

"Even today, if you walked into a cafe and asked how many people had been adducted by aliens," one long-time resident, the writer Eve Conant, told me, "I suspect one in 10 would raise their hands." A popular Sedona diner is called Red Planet, where alien kitsch decorates the walls and, at night, you can drink a "Mothership Margarita" and bathe in the intense pinkish glow cast by neon lights.

The New Age crowd was assimilated into Sedona with a surprising lack of friction. "These people are interesting, and they don't bother anyone," said Ivan Finley, Sedona's mayor in the late 1990's. "And how can you quarrel with them? Even for those of us who don't dance in circles, it's hard to live here and not be a little bit spiritual. It's a humbling place."

Still, the United States Forest Service sometimes complains about the stone medicine wheels that people build — and leave — in the wilderness.

The New Age migrants were not the first to be drawn to this mystical place. Native American tribes, including the Yavapai and later the Tonto Apache, were drawn there as early as 1300 A.D. They were driven off the land by the United States Army in the 1870's after gold was discovered in nearby Prescott. (You can find well-preserved cave paintings and rock art all around Sedona. The Palatki Ruins, a few miles out of town, are especially good.)

Sedona took its name, in 1902, from the given name of the wife of Carl Schnebly, an early postmaster. He'd initially wanted to call the place "Schnebly Station," but Schnebly was, perhaps fortunately, too long for a postage cancellation stamp. (It's hard to imagine, more than a century later, a minivan named the Kia Schnebly.)

The more recent influx of big money — Al Pacino owns a house — and skyrocketing housing prices do have a lot of local people worried, however. "Sedona is definitely becoming a place for the haves, not the have-nots," Mr. Sprague tells visitors, in a weary voice, on his jeep tour.

Yet the best thing about Sedona — especially in the off-season — is that it feels like the small town that it really is. The city's year-round population is still only about 11,000, a number that's swollen by the more than 3 million tourists who visit every year, mostly in the summer. The number of high-end resorts may be increasing, too, but Sedona still feels, most of the time, pleasantly poky. This isn't Aspen. There's a tasteful, turquoise-arched McDonald's on the main street here but no Louis Vuitton outlets in sight.

"This is still the kind of place where, when you go to the grocery store, you know a lot of people," Ms. Conant said.

I'd come to Sedona with my wife and two young children in early February, the quiet season. Temperatures can drop below freezing at night but the sun warms things up nicely during the day. (This year was far warmer, and far drier, than usual.) The traffic jams that beset the city in the summer were almost nonexistent.

Even in February, though, Sedona can be a tough place to drive. The views are so stupendous that rubbernecking tourists, gazing upward at the red rocks, swerve crazily across the medians.

We were probably swerving, too, as we entered the city. We'd flown into Phoenix, two hours south of Sedona, late the night before. We got out of Phoenix early and spent the morning in Jerome, a terrifically crusty historic mining town that clings to a mountainside about 30 miles west of Sedona.

Friends had told us not to miss the abandoned Gold King Mine, now a rambling outdoor graveyard of rusting old mining equipment. They were right. This place may be the most perfectly unfussy museum left in America. For a few dollars, you can walk the grounds — it's like touring the ghostly, hulking ruins of the early American industrial age. The children loved the rabbits and chickens that run free there, and the penned-up goats that nibble pellets out of your hand.

Just outside Jerome, in nearby Cottonwood, we made a U-turn when we spied a roadside taco wagon next to the Verde Hay Market ("Ranch and Vet Supplies — We Grow our Own Hay"). Little did we know that these killer tacos, slathered with grilled jalepeños and onions and thin radish slices, were the best Southwestern food we'd see for the next four or five days. Sedona has some good places to eat, mostly of the eclectic American variety (crusted this, braised that) you can find almost anywhere. But the traveling foodie who seeks sharp authentic regional flavors here is going to be disappointed.

IF you want a feel for old Sedona, show up for breakfast, as we did on our first morning, at the Coffee Pot restaurant ("Home of the Famous 101 Omelets"), a place so popular with local folk that you may have to park in the mall parking lot across the street and scamper across a busy highway to get there. It's dinnertime equivalent is Cowboy Club Grille & Spirits, where you can follow an appetizer of rattlesnake skewers with a buffalo burger while taking in the cowboy memorabilia that's spread across the walls.

After a hefty breakfast at the Coffee Pot, take a walk downtown, where you quickly get a sense of this city's contradictions. The soaring red rocks rise above clusters of mostly tasteful housing developments and a downtown that's lined with strip malls. (Beware the storefronts with signs saying "visitor's information" that are actually full of aggressive time-share salesmen.)

One of the best things to do in Sedona while you're getting your bearings is to take a jeep tour of the surrounding landscape. Most of the guides are very knowledgeable about the area's history and its flora and fauna, and it's a chance to scout for the best hiking trails.

In addition to the Earth Wisdom tour I took, I climbed aboard the popular "Broken Arrow" tour run by the Pink Jeep Tours company, a local institution. My children came too, and they screamed (mostly with delight) almost the whole way: these jeeps go over rocks and up inclines that you would have thought were impossible. The trails are so demanding that, according to Pink Jeep, Goodyear frequently supplies the tour company with free tires for testing. Adults will find that their backsides take a mighty pounding on this two-hour tour, but it's worth it; the views are extraordinary. The other good news: Pink Jeep and most of the other jeep-tour companies are seriously conservation-minded: they stick to the approved trails and are quick to alert the Forest Service about jeeps or motorbikes that don't.

This tour gives you a good sense of why Hollywood, in the era of westerns, was so taken with Sedona. Among the movies made here: "Riders of the Purple Sage" (1931), John Wayne's "Angel and the Badman" (1947) and the James Stewart movie "Broken Arrow" (1950).

Unlike my wife, who whiled away hours in solo hiker heaven on the area's terrific trails, I'm pretty lazy. As she discovered, Sedona has more than 100 hiking trails, and it's hard to pick a bad one. I did take one serious hike on the deservedly well-known Boynton Canyon Trail, part of which leads up to a spire called Kachina Woman, which some people think supplies the Canyon's mellow, shimmering energy.

There's so much to do in Sedona, between the hiking, the jeep tours and shopping excursions at places like Tlaquepaque, a sprawling arts-and-crafts village on the city's south side, that it's easy to burn out. After two days of exploring and one night at the Matterhorn Inn, an inexpensive hotel in the downtown shopping district, we were more than ready for some R & R.

We found it at the appropriately-named Enchantment Resort, and its accompanying Mii Amo Spa, both tucked snugly into Boynton Canyon. This place is like a pueblo-style college campus, with rooms spread across several acres and easy access to swimming pools, hot tubs and restaurants, all of them with spectacular views.

Enchantment doesn't come cheaply. Rooms start at $295 a night and go as high as $1,500 for a two-bedroom luxury suite. And other expenditures can add up. A bottle of Absolut vodka from room service is $135.

But it's easy to lose yourself here: there's "Camp Coyote" for kids to attend during the daytime, and at night Enchantment provides baby-sitters.

We spent a lot of time at the preternaturally beautiful spa. There's a room called the Crystal Grotto to sit in and meditate. There are slips of paper and pencils outside the grotto. You write your worries on a piece of the paper and drop it into a basket. Later these are burned, releasing your cares. It's worth a try, right? So I scribbled something about my credit card not being declined and tossed it in.

At the spa's restaurant and juice bar, everything on the menu has the letters V, P, or K after it — for "Vata pacifying food," "Pitta pacifying food" or "Kapha pacifying food." I still have no idea what those things are. But the fruit smoothie I drank, with added echinacea and ginkgo biloba, did ward off my oncoming cold, one that had already flattened my children.

There are more types of cutting-edge massages, facials and yoga programs available here than you thought existed. And it you want a past-life regression session ($220), a psychic massage ($130 an hour), a "palm reading for empowerment" ($130 an hour) or a tarot card reading ($130), you've come to the right place.

Enchantment is serious about pampering its guests, and I recommend a stay here. Even here, though, the food is only vaguely Southwestern and occasionally mediocre. (An order of tacos came in bland crunchy shells that reminded me of my high school cafeteria. In the morning, the coffee is so weak that — as Woody Guthrie once sang about Depression-era stew — you could read a magazine right through it.)

Oh well. As a friend who'd grown up near Sedona told me: "This is a place to cleanse oneself, not pollute oneself. A place to shed, not gain."

We did leave Sedona feeling cleansed and yearning for a return visit. But anyone whose aura is still out of whack after a week in Sedona can, before leaving, drop into a New Age trinket shop and buy something called "Vortex in a Can."

According to the label, the contents have been "humanely gathered during the full lunar eclipse by nonsmoking vegetarians."

Crack it open and take a deep breath.

----------------
Finding the Enchantment

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GETTING THERE

You can fly from New York City to Phoenix on most major airlines although many flights require changing planes. JetBlue (www.jetblue.com) has a direct flight every evening from Kennedy Airport (with a red-eye return trip). Fares start at $343 for travel in late April. Sedona is a two-hour drive north from Phoenix; the Grand Canyon is another two-and-a-half hours north from Sedona.

------
WHERE TO STAY

Sedona is full of well-run idiosyncratic hotels in all price ranges. It's hard (though not impossible) to find a room without a remarkable view. The Enchantment Resort and Mii Amo Spa, 928-282-2900, http://www.enchantmentresort.com, in Boynton Canyon is, well, enchanting. Many rooms have fireplaces. (One-bedroom suites from $295.)

El Portal Sedona, 928-203-9405, http://www.innsedona.com, in the historic arts district is another good bet. Rooms start at $250. Each room here has a different rustic-chic décor.

The Saddle Rock Ranch, 928-282-7640, 255 Rockridge Drive, http://www.saddlerockranch.com, is in a remodeled 1920's-era ranch-style home; Barry Goldwater was a regular visitor. Rooms start at $169.

The Forest Houses Resort, 928-282-2999, http://www.foresthousesresort.com, is a series of cabins along Oak Creek. You'll feel happily far from civilization; its rooms have no televisions or phones. Cabins start at $90. The Forest Houses Web site warns about the small animals you'll see around and the harmless mice and spiders that occasionally sneak into rooms. "There is no extra charge for these critters," it explains.

At the no-frills Matterhorn Inn, 928-282-7176, on the Web at http://www.matterhornlodge.com, 230 Apple Avenue, in Sedona's uptown shopping district, rooms are about $139.

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WHERE TO EAT

The homey Coffee Pot Restaurant, 2050 West Highway 89A, 928-282-6626, is the "Home of the Famous 101 Omlets" and a local favorite.

The local hippie intelligensia hangs out at Raven Heart Coffee, 928-282-5777, http://www.ravenheartcoffee.net. There are two locations in Sedona; both have strong brew and Wi-Fi.

At Cowboy Club Grille & Spirits, 241 North Highway 89A, 928-282-4200, http://www.cowboyclub.com, there's cowboy gear on the walls and roomy booths, not to mention good margaritas, rattlesnake skewers and buffalo burgers. Children will like the Red Planet Diner, 1655 West Highway 89A, 928-282-6070, where flying saucer kitsch decorates the walls.

It's hard to find authentic Southwestern food in Sedona. There are plenty of good Continental or American-style restaurants: try the Yavapai Restaurant at the Enchantment Resort, 928-282-2900, and René at Tlaquepaque, 363 Highway 179, 928-282-9225, http://www.rene-sedona.com, which serves French food. In our quest for good Southwestern or Tex-Mex, we settled for Javelina Cantina, 671 Highway 179, 928-203-9514. The margaritas, burritos and fish tacos are quite good.
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http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/t ... edona.html
 
I don't know why, but this story of the archway popped into my head recently (I read it years back), and I decided to find this post again just to reread about it again. Anyways, I thought I would mention that somebody made a documentary about this alleged time portal. It's a ridiculously long video, but if you fast forward closer to the end they find the archway, which is much less dramatic than I pictured it in my imagination.

http://xpeditionstv.com/15/index.html
 
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