Danger on Bell Rock
Blindness, bliss, and terror in central Arizona, the pursuit of craziness and the secret vortex
For months I dreamed of roaming the trails south of Sedona, which weave like loose threads through Oak Creek Canyon. On Google Maps, I’d follow routes with my mouse cursor, click on image links, and imagine myself trekking across the rocky chaparral, detouring briefly for far-out vortex experiences.
After playing all day, I’d arrive at Oak Creek, where I’d baptize myself, and wash the dust from my satisfied head. Jenna would pick me up in the rental car.
She wouldn’t hike with me. She’d been on too many adventures prefaced with pretty pictures that somehow ended up sideways. We’d enjoyed some pleasant days in the mountains together, sure, but she’d learned well my tendency to wander too far out, too far up. Anyway, she intended to comb local thrift shops.
We rented a little desert bungalow outside of the Village at Oak Creek and skipped out on the southern spring for cactus country. Our six-year-old daughter headed to Disney – to Florida for god’s sake – with her grandparents. We were thankful for the free time and also that we didn’t have to go to Disney. But even as we had this western adventure in front of us, I couldn’t shed the worry about her being in Florida while we were on the other side of the continent. Thoughts of child abductors, alligators, and the angry Trump militia spun around my head. I tried to control these thoughts, but they kept coming, like waves washing onto Daytona Beach.
What if she returned to us a Disney fanatic? What would we do then?
Despite the paranoia, the appeal of the desert did lift my spirits. I had never been to Arizona but had read all about the wonders of the canyon near Sedona. Vortex visitors claimed otherworldly experiences. Some even said they’d been healed of illnesses.
Also, I was excited about the road to Sedona. We took an intentional detour through the Saguaro.
We’d been confined by the fences of our Georgia farm like cattle since the onset of Covid. We had a trip to Costa Rica canceled and were growing more feral by the day. I cherish the woods around my house, but I had seen enough of them. The time for adventure had come.
I tried to keep an open mind about the vortex thing.
I read an article about how the indigenous people of the area, the Sinagua, never stayed too long in the canyon. They thought the place to be sacred, but, according to this article, no indigenous communities had lasted near what today is Sedona. The Sinagua lived west in Palatki or east near what today is Camp Verde. The author claimed that they called the canyon “the place that makes you crazy.”
Scouring hiker blogs, I found a post by a sincere-sounding local about a “secret vortex” on the eastern side of Bell Rock, the less-frequented backside of a popular tourist hiking spot. One day I looked up how many people had died hiking or climbing in the area. Lots.
Could there be something to this place making people crazy?
Tuesday morning started slow. The previous night we’d gone into Sedona, found too many trinket shops and headed back to the Village to get drunk on wine. I woke up groggy and did some stretching on the patio, which had a fantastic view of the massive wall of rock between Jack’s Canyon and the formation known as the Courthouse. I was saved on the patio, thanks to the local herbal remedies shop.
Jenna dropped me beside Highway 179, at the Bell Rock trailhead, a mile south of Bell Rock. One path ran north along the side of the butte, one cut east across a prairie. From above, Bell Rock looks like a rusty smattering of paint on a Martian canvas. Before me on the trail, it rose above the landscape like a monster.
Still a bit wobbly at this juncture, I gazed at the huge wall of rock to the east, which appeared impressionistic in a filter of haze lingering across the sky. Beneath the rockface, tons of boulders, broken chunks that had rolled downhill across millennia, sat in stacks as large as mansions. In the prairie, vibrant lime green grass bent in the breeze. Beyond, the jagged tops of pines met the gnarly back of Jack’s Creek Canyon. I hung on the car door, wide-mouthed and drooly.
“Hope you have a nice time,” I said.
She looked serious. “Please be careful.”
“Just going to hit a few miles of trail, that’s all. Call you when I’m done.”
I wore a little canvas day pack, which held a full water bottle, two bananas, my pen and journal, and half a jay. I started north with the intention of rounding the side of Bell Rock and crossing the highway.
I walked slowly, mesmerized by plants, wondering what each might be related to back east. Yellow flowers on a holly-like shrub, white wheely coreopsis in sediment, orange dainty blooms among leaves fuzzy like lamb’s ear, and the like.
People passing smiled and said hello. The haze of the morning lifted, and a clear day began to emerge. The air held a coolness that wouldn’t last.
I came to an opening between the highway and Bell Rock. Tourists of all shapes strode up the gradual incline of the formation’s north side. Most of them hung around the bottom looking for vortexes (I assumed), which as far as I could tell were unmarked. I expected to see lines of folks waiting for 15-minute turns in well-advertised energy whirlpools.
Out in the open, I felt my neck sizzle and realized I had forgotten to apply sunscreen there. The day was just beginning to heat up. I wore a baseball hat that covered my face, but my neck stuck out like a white sheet on a clothesline.
I crawled under a juniper and ate a banana.
This is the moment, which, looking back, baffles me. I told you about my intention to cover lots of ground that day. Brief detours, I said. After the banana, I chose for some reason to tramp momentarily around the base of Bell Rock. Perhaps I was looking for a quick vista. Perhaps I thought, like other tourists, I’d find a vortex. Maybe the idea of the secret vortex, which had clung to the back of my mind, stirred to life and prodded me uphill. Whatever the case, that’s what happened. I abandoned the shade of the creek bed and turned toward the open air, sun and rock, winter-skinned and ill-prepared.
Something else that confuses me: I am typically the type to avoid crowds. There’s tons of wilderness in this area; it’s easy to find places without people. I am bewildered that I would choose to get caught up in maybe the most touristy hiking area near Sedona. But I would find out that even tourist sites have their wild sides.
Things happen as they must, I’ve heard.
Children and old folks shuffled up a gradual incline, which leveled into a tabletop of rock, where people took selfies. Europeans laughed. American yuppies, some with tour guides, looked like they’d just left REI. Their hiking poles struck bare stone!
At this stage of life, I was (and am) struggling just to stave off becoming one of those yuppies. I was a decent mountaineer in my twenties, hiked and camped all across the national forest lands of the Blue Ridge, but the most outdoor exercise I had before coming on this trip was pushing a lawnmower around the yard.
I walked through and above the mass of people. (Maybe it was the people who drove me up!) The steeper the path got, the fewer souls braved it.
A Japanese family, led by a girl, maybe ten years old, walked ahead of me. The trail met a wall that required about eight feet of climbing. The girl jumped to it and scaled the wall like a spider. She stood at the top, smiling, looking down at her family. They cheered her on then each followed. I was amazed to see this, thinking most American families would be over-cautioning their kids in this situation.
When I got to the wall, I felt the spritely stir of fear in my chest. We were nearly halfway up Bell Rock, and though it was basically a stair-shaped blotch, the formation became steeper the higher it went.
Two women standing at the top of the wall saw me hesitating at the bottom. One of them said, “Don’t worry, this is the hardest part.”
My breathing trembled as I climbed the little thing, looking behind me once to see the sprawling red Arizona earth. Part of my fear, I think, was the confusion my brain felt in such a striking new environment. On the dusty desert rock, I was out of touch with the basic laws of physics.
Above the wall, I hit a few switchbacks, zig-zagging farther up. I stood at a split in the path and realized there were no people around me. The family I had been following had vanished. I assumed they’d taken the path headed east around the curve of the formation, but still, it was strange having walked through lots of people to then find yourself alone a few hundred feet higher.
The trail heading east stretched up to the base of high-rising cliffs, to the handle of the bell. The path meandered skyward between two conical towers of stone. A passage to Mordor? It definitely looked like the doorway to a secret vortex.
I climbed up through the rock columns to a landing area where there were more chimney-shaped formations. One of the chimneys, with a perfectly flat top, was accessible by easy climbing. A middle-aged lady sprawled out on its crown. I wanted to climb up and join her but there wasn’t enough room for two people. She looked like an ant on top of a pencil eraser. Vast stretches of earth rose behind her. She beamed in full vortex immersion.
She sat up, looked down at me, and yelled, “Can I take your picture?” She wore sunglasses and an uninhibited smile.
“Sure!”
I hollered out my number.
“It’s such a gorgeous day,” she yelled. She smiled widely and laid back down. I had hoped she’d come down and trade places with me, but I saw her back nestle into the stone. She squirmed like an earthworm in red rock dust.
A mother and teenage daughter came up the path and sat on the landing. The mother said she was afraid of heights but was doing this for her daughter. The few of us were probably the highest people on the formation at the time.
I kept moving on a narrow gradual incline around the east side of the butte. The trail ran like a staircase until, at last, I perched on the edge of oblivion. High cliffs fell below me and cliffs mounted over my head. The only way to go farther up would’ve been with climbing equipment, and I’m not a climber.
Crouching for a moment, feeling the wind lick the side of my face, I watched people below moving around like tiny insects, lost, roaming over the landscape. Cliff swallows zipped by me and through the canyon. All the things I’d been worried about washed back over me. But from here, my problems seemed less important. I was a speck on a cliffside, observing the wide world, which reminded me of a romantic painting, rich thick oil slathered across the groovy canvas of space. All of it was so beautiful yet equivocal, long and full of love yet loveless. The details of the painting, in such a grand scene, did not matter much.
My phone rang. It was my mother. She sounded lit. She said they were lounging at a pool. Lula played in the shallow end. I told her I was hiking and stopped to rest.
“Please be careful,” she said. “Those trails are full of crazy people.”
“Stop watching CSI,” I told her. “I’m not anywhere dangerous; there aren’t any people around me.”
Sticking out my neck, I surveyed the drop in front.
I continued around the side of Bell Rock, moving gradually down. Looking eastward, I saw an empty landscape, with no people, which should’ve been a sign for me to turn around. Instead, I decided I would find a path down from here.
The path I was on dropped a couple of hundred feet until it ended on an open plateau. There was no place left to hike down. To the left and right, the formation dropped into steep rock walls. I walked close to the ledge and looked below to find another clearly-worn path. But it sat at the bottom of a ten-foot drop. I knew I could continue on this route and find a way down without having to hike the hour-long journey back if I could just get to the bottom.
It was only ten feet, right?
I sat thinking about jumping. Then, rather impulsively, I removed my pack and dropped it below. I regretted this immediately. Now I had to jump.
Squatting on the edge of the drop, my heart raced. I scooted forward, legs in front, and slid off, like a water turtle. I slammed into the rock below, my knees met my chest and my bones crunched. A lightning bolt of pain shot through my legs and ankles.
“I made it!” I yelled as if gravity were somehow a gamble. I was not, however, in good shape. My left ankle throbbed intensely. I massaged it and adrenaline reduced the pain (to some degree). My heart beat like an engine.
The place where I landed was like the top of an arch. To the left and right, rock-covered paths ran down the formation. These were more likely water washouts than trails worn by people, but they were passable. In front of me, up a short incline, laid a large, perfectly flat boulder with a view into the abyss below. I grabbed my bag and ran on top.
The big, flat-topped boulder I stood on then would’ve made a fine resting point before heading off of Bell Rock. Also, it was as vortex-looking as any place I saw that day. But from this lofty vantage, I gazed further south and saw something that caught my attention.
On top of the butte’s second layer of cliffs, maybe a couple of hundred feet below, sat a strange-looking ring of bowling-ball-sized rocks. The rocks had clearly been organized by someone. They were a near-perfect circle; one end of the circle was broken. I suddenly felt exhilarated, like I had made it to this place for a reason. This must be the secret vortex! It was located, after all, “on the other side of Bell Rock.” I made the quick sideways decision to climb down to it.
Actually, I’m not sure I thought too much about it at all. The ring excited me so much that I simply started walking, thinking, I’m no goddamn tourist!
This decision, or lack of a clear decision, was one of a string of ill-conceived moves that might have gotten me in real trouble that day. As morning became noon, the sun turned Bell Rock into a warming skillet. The exposed part of my neck began to burn and my ankle started throbbing again. My head, or more specifically my thinking faculties, seemed to be under a spell. Perhaps it was the sheer beauty of the place, or the newness, that drove me, but I felt a burst of energy, a wonderful rousing, despite my injury. I ignored warning signs I should’ve listened to.
I suppose my experience of mountains back east might’ve informed me that there’s always a way down. In Appalachia, one only needs to find a falling ridge. But I was not in Appalachia.
I descended through a winding gully, between boulders that could crush me like a bug, and came to a dangerous pass. To get to the ring, I had to cross a narrow ledge, four feet wide, maybe twelve feet across. The ledge was not flat but slightly slanted. Below was open air and the wind blew harder here than anywhere I had been that day. I shimmied across the ledge not looking down. I looked back after crossing and the sight made me nauseous.
The stone ring waited in quiet prominence. An astonishing view opened. I could see the length of Jack’s Canyon in the distance. A giant red wall, Cathedral Rock, towered above it to the left.
I stood on top of the second of three layers of Bell Rock, on its southeasterly face. I had been crawling around on this massive timeworn stone, formed by ancient sea deposits, and had left the tourist side of the rock for a true adventure. The sun kissed my forehead. No one who loved me had any idea where I was. What the hell was I doing?
I sat down in the ring, drank some water, and took a few deep breaths. Immediately, my ankle felt better. I laid on the bare rock and closed my eyes. At first, the sun was hot but a breeze rolled over and cooled my body.
There are really no words to describe what happened in the ring. The cynic in my head says I was tired, emotional, and moved by the grandeur of the place. But I know there was more to it than that. Lying there, I felt the rock beneath my body humming, like the soft buzz of someone’s voice. It was subtle at first but within seconds, it became more pronounced, and I could feel the hum throughout my body. It moved in waves like a melody. Was it saying something, singing something? I was overcome with joy.
I felt lucky to be where I was and knew somehow that my journey here wasn’t a mistake. I examined like flashcards all the worries that had been occupying my mind – my marriage, my sweet innocent child subjected to Disney, and my oppressive work schedule. It all seemed trivial. I knew everything would be okay.
Similar to some psychedelic experiences I’ve had, and perhaps exhaustion and a lingering joint buzz did play into this, I enjoyed a mystic-type connection to, not only this place, though this place was spectacular, but to life in general and to the whole of the world. In the vortex, which by then I knew to be real, I felt the feeling which is the basis of religion, that there is within us humans a god-likeness, that we are responsible for our lives, that our lives are holy, and that we are never really disconnected from its source. We and the source are one, in other words. We are the universe or God or whatever expressing itself in funky far-out ways. In love and curiosity and terror and dread.
Tears rolled down my face.
But here is the power of fear. For as long as people have existed, fear, more than bliss, has driven us. After a few minutes, I could feel the heat of the sun burning my face. My eyes opened. The oblique view of the lime-green meadow hundreds of feet below rattled my brain. I didn’t know where I was, not really. I had no idea if there was a way down from here. And that thought had not crossed my mind, not really, until then. I had leaped off of a ten-foot wall like a maniac. I had climbed down a ravine and crossed a dangerous ledge to get to a circle of rocks.
I spent no more than a few minutes bobbing in the orphic sea of the vortex when the alarm went off. I jumped up, grabbed my bag, and began searching wildly for a way down. I ran south, farther away from the place I had jumped until I found a ravine that twisted out of sight. I climbed hurriedly down through the turns of its rocky wash, the sun bearing down. To stay hydrated, I took small sips of water. I felt out of sorts, dizzy, and feverish. I kept telling myself, “You are strong, you’re going to get out of here,” but as the ravine gave way to a bed of boulders, I could see an end to the path and nothing below but the distant tops of pines. When I finally made it to the end of the rope, I stood on the edge of a cliff, with nothing to my left or right but rocks too steep for climbing.
Worst-case scenarios flashed through my head. I could die up here. I had very few resources - one banana, and a gulp of water. Maybe I would succumb to exposure or fall trying to find a way out. I did have service and half a battery. I could call the forest service. They’d probably enjoy rescuing me. They were probably waiting for the call.
My only chance was to go back the way I came, all the way back up to where I had jumped. There was another route there I could try, in the opposite direction. Thinking of what I had to traverse just to get back there, I had a brief panic attack. I took deep breaths to calm myself and repeated, “I can do this.” I thought about my sweet daughter. I was not going to die out here. I had to make it back. This thought gave me a boost of energy, and I scurried up the ravine.
Back at the vortex, the narrow ledge I had crossed to get there waited like a doorway to hell. I crouched and said a prayer.
My phone rang. Jenna.
“How’s it going?”
“Going good,” I replied.
She must’ve sensed the anxiety in my voice. She gave an “Okayy,” then said, “Just take it slow.”
Good advice.
She was calling because she couldn’t get the joint container open.
“It’s really hard,” she said, laughing.
“You just squeeze the edges and pull,” I said.
She was still in Sedona.
“Almost out of here. I’ll call you when I’m down.”
“Take it slow,” she repeated.
The ledge was no problem, I told myself, even though my breathing quickened. I would die or I wouldn’t.
I shuffled across, one foot in front of the other. Despite the surface being littered in grimy sediment, my boots, Merrell Moabs, clung to the rock. Even as I gave a quick glance at the terrible sight to my right, I was reassured by the feeling of my footwear. They must’ve been made for such places.
I hurried back up to the spot where I had leaped from the ten-foot wall. I surveyed the ravine on the opposite side. The decline was steep but doable. And really, I had no other choice other than calling in the choppers.
A hundred yards down, I came to a fork. The path I was on continued below and out of sight. To the left, another ledge with a slanted surface wrapped around the side of the formation.
The ledge looked promising – it definitely led toward civilization – but sediment littered its surface. I was hoping to avoid more risks and decided to continue down into the ravine.
I paused for a moment, feeling tired and still a bit out of my mind. My legs wobbled like guitar strings. I found a little juniper twisting out of the rock like a bonsai and crawled under its meager shade. Sunburnt and injured, I decided to rest here for a moment. I drank the remaining sip of my water, ate my last bruised banana, and prayed to God, the one about whom I am generally agnostic (every man turns to religion when in pain), to help me find a way off of Bell Rock.
After a few minutes under the tree, I headed down. It didn’t take long to realize I was on another path that ended in a pile of boulders perched at the top of a precipice. When I saw this, all the air came out of me. I felt like giving up. I had one last option. I would have to try the ledge.
The ledge protruded from the slope before me like the backside of a crescent moon. Below, like everywhere else on this damned rock, death waited like a reticent vulture.
This ledge had more tiny pebbles covering its surface than the last one. But the slant of the thing scared me the most. I imagined getting halfway across, and, trying to traverse an impassable gradient, sliding on the little loose stones straight off the formation like a kid on a waterslide to my forever pool.
I started shuffling and found again my footwear gripping the rock. (This whole spiel is really just a Merrell ad.) I ground the soles of my boots into every step and moved with intention. I repeated the mantra, “I can do this; I’m going to get out of here; I’m going to see my family again.” I crept, hunched over, like a goblin in the night, toward the sun. Fortunately, as I rounded the corner, the slant of the ledge leveled out. I allowed myself to look below as the rock gave way to safer terrain and saw only the tops of trees flapping like windshield wipers in the breeze.
Before I knew it, I had made it across. I rounded the corner, and, coming to an opening, saw a holy sight: the most basic-looking tourists you can imagine. One even wore a fanny pack. I had never been so happy to see ordinary people. And the best part: between them and I stood lots of passable ground – boulders, yucca, trees, a trail. I had made it.
I shouted, “Yes!” But I felt like collapsing. Only minutes before I had imagined my death. I had climbed long stretches down to find dead ends twice, and twice, I had clawed my way back up again. I crossed ledges that I never should’ve crossed and made several dumb decisions. Bell Rock had beaten me. But I came through.
I got off of the formation as quickly as possible. In the valley below, I examined where I had been and smiled at my stupidity. I called Jenna and told her I’d done something really dumb but that I was safe now. She was not surprised. She was still doing her thing, so I decided to ditch the trail. I walked two miles, dirty, hurting, dehydrated and dizzy, back to the Village at Oak Creek, collapsed in a bar room chair, and asked for tequila.
There is a point at which curiosity turns its back on you. It has taken me longer to learn this than it should ever take any reasonable person. Does anyone ever know when the time is right to turn around? I am asking sincerely because I don’t. But at least on Bell Rock I learned that I should be more familiar with my limitations and that I should mind my curiosity only for so long.
I am distracted by the wonders of the world. I don’t know why. I was born this way. Or made this way. I want not necessarily to be more but to know more and to experience things uncommon to daily monotony. Safety is tossed aside in the pursuit of newness. Perhaps this ties back into the limitations thing. I should’ve known that day that leaping off of a ten-foot rock wall, with only rock beneath, on the people-less side of an unfamiliar formation was not the best idea. Yet there I went, off the wall.
If I have any advice, it is to know thyself. Maybe not so much in a Socratic sense (but not far from it). We need to know, before we go out into strange places, what we are capable of. We need to know what might break us.
I say this with hesitation since any advice I might give outside of the context of this story would be to never limit yourself. In the case of unknown terrain, red rock ledges, vortexes, the Arizona sun, and the neglectful application of sunscreen, sure, go ahead and limit yourself. Does that make me a yuppie? So be it.
On the other hand, I’m not completely sure what drove me that day. It felt more like madness than curiosity. More like being partially out of my mind. I had read about the secret vortex and perhaps, somewhere within me, an agreement was made to find it. Is that the same as curiosity? Or is that what we call fate? Maybe I needed that sort of trouble. Maybe I was dragged up there for a reckoning. Whatever the case, to some degree, Bell Rock did change me. It made me crazy and it changed me.
Oof - that fickle double edge of curiosity. I hear you; would opt for it any day though. This was a gorgeously (and terrifyingly) rendered adventure - thanks for giving me a glimpse of the wild this morning 💚