The five-per-centers

Saturday, April 2, 2011

CORNVILLE, AZ – There’s an elite group of people among all those who come to Sedona and gaze, slack-jawed, at the amazing vistas all around the town, and we joined it today. Thousands pass through and shop at the galleries and boutiques, eat on restaurant patios and verandahs, or lounge in spas and jacuzzis.

But only five per cent of that total actually go off the beaten track to witness first hand the natural wonders of Red Rock Country. Thanks to a frustrated land seller in the early fifties, who branched out by taking visitors around some of the rock formations by jeep, since they didn’t seem interested in purchasing properties, the Pink Jeep Tours business was launched for the benefit of those adventurers.

Our tour began at nine o’clock this morning, a perfect time of day before the sun was too hot. Seven of us climbed into a vivid pink jeep driven by Bill, who just happened to be celebrating his fiftieth birthday. Another couple, Wayne and Carol, were celebrating their wedding anniversary. By the end of our off-road jaunt, we were all celebrating the fact we were still alive and in one piece!

The three-hour package we opted for was called the Scenic Rim and Broken Arrow combo. It included a visit to the heights of the red rocks looking down over Sedona, followed by an off-road romp over bone-jangling rocks and dips to an area that had been the backdrop for a 1950s movie called Broken Arrow, starring Jimmy Stewart and Jeff Chandler.

Bill the driver explained some of the geology and botany of the area. We learned that the rock faces with a southern exposure tended to be bare of vegetation, compared to cooler, north-facing ones which retained more moisture, and so had lots of pine trees on them.

I also learned the difference between a mesa and a butte. The mesa is a hill with a flat top, and a butte occurs when erosion wears away the “shoulders” of a mesa for so long that it becomes like a narrow column. If it really becomes thin, they call it a spike.

Bill put our pink jeep through its paces big-time. He did not spare the horsepower over the rocky dirt road of the first portion of our trip, so we were jostling and lurching a lot in the back, grabbing what pillars or handles we could to stay vertical as he swung around the bends in the road. It became very clear why he advised us to keep our seatbelts fastened at all times!

If we thought that was rough, we had no words for the second portion of the trip, which involved boulders and ditches as opposed to gravel and potholes earlier! We scaled huge rocks at a 60-degree angle, and he would stop in the midst of the rise to tell a joke while we wondered if we were going to topple off altogether. He steered the jeep straight toward a rock wall and turned around to chat with us, lurching to one side just before we hit the wall. We could tell he was having a good time, and we got into the spirit of it too.

All the while, we were seeing the most spectacular views of rocks, desert plants, a brilliant blue sky and the distant valleys and mountains beyond. We got out several times to snap pictures and just gaze on the scenes before us in total awe.

A couple of guys were out on the rocks riding mountain bikes, with their dog loping along behind them. We watched them ride up to the top of some huge rounded rocks and turn back to come pelting down. Later on, we watched, aghast, as they rode along narrow grooves of an almost vertical rock face across from us. I had to look away, finally, because I didn’t want to see them plummet to their deaths thousands of feet below.

Our Pink Jeep tour is an off-road adventure that will remain in our memories for a long, long time.