The Subway Cave! (Boynton Canyon, part 3)

Sedona Travelog #9
Sedona, AZ - Sun, 29 May 2022, 12:30pm

We found the Subway Cave!

It turned out it wasn't hard to find.... We just had to wait until around midday when the trail was really crowded with noob hikers who saw it on Instagram (noobs don't know to get an early start like we did) then look for where the scads of people were going. At an unsigned trail junction a bit farther out from our butterfly spotting side trip there were, like, twenty people standing around in a gaggle talking about the Subway Cave.



The side trail of about half a mile, maybe three-quarters, led back to a rock formation in a side canyon. I knew from seeing an Instagram picture that the Subway Cave is not really a cave, per se, but a layer in the sandstone rock that's eroded out from the layers above and below it, forming a C shape is cross-section. And I could see from where everyone was going... or trying to go... that it would take a scramble to get up there.



There were actually two routes up to the ledge level. The safer one was a scramble up dirt and rocks with some trees to hang onto. The more fun one was this scramble up bare rock through a slot. People who've never rock-scrambled before and/or had footwear without good grip (Instagram hiking noobs were just as likely to be here in walking shoes as anything else) were slipping, sliding, and giving up. So once a bunch of them cleared out I scrambled up.



Like I said, the Subway Cave is not a cave, per se. The part with a solid roof over it doesn't go that deep into the rock. But it's called subway because it does look a bit like the curvature of a subway tunnel on the side. Well, some subway tunnels have curved sides.



With the Subway Cave being so popular it was difficult to get pictures without other people in them. I succeeded in getting a few, but I also figured if I've got to have other people in my pictures, I'll encourage them to do nice things. 😂

Stay tuned... more to come!

Update: Keep reading in Cliff Dwellings & Subway Cave

Back from Vacation, Back to Work

We got home from our 4-day weekend trip to Sedona last night. Today we're back to work.

"Wait, weren't you at the Subway Cave in Boyton Canyon just a few hours ago?" you might wonder. "Did you cut your trip short and rush home?"

Blog Backlogged. Backblogged?

Haha, no, we didn't rush home from the Subway Cave. We hiked Boynton Canyon on Sunday. Today's Wednesday already. As usual my outdoors travel blog is backlogged (backblogged?). There's virtually never enough time to keep up with it when I'm busy doing stuff.

I figure I've got 7 more blog entries to go for this trip. I aim to be caught up by Saturday.... Though it could slip until Sunday if I decide to work in some non-trip writing that's stuck in the queue.

Forgetting about Work: Success!

This vacation was a success in at least one key respect: Forgetting about work. For pretty much the entirety of the trip I didn't think about work. That's key because you read about so many Americans being unable to leave their jobs behind when they take vacation. It spoils the whole premise of vacation to have to carve out a few hours here and there to do urgent work. Even if you're consumed by worry about, "OMG, there will be so much piled up waiting for me when I get back," it spoils the intent.

Now, I didn't have work 💯 out of mind. As I did on our Hawaii trip in April, I scanned my queue of work email a few times to make sure nothing was catching on fire. Urgent messages were unlikely this trip, anyway, as Memorial Day was three-day weekend for pretty much everyone in the US. Also as before, I glanced at notifications in Slack a few times, again just to make sure they were nothing I had to address before Wednesday. And "address" would've been me reminding them I'm OOTO for one more day!

Now Back to Work

There is a downside to successfully forgetting about work for 4 days. It's that today I'm back to work and have to resume everything! But fortunately, again, it was a 3 day weekend for most of my colleagues and customers, so I'm not too far out of phase.

One respect in which getting back to work today has not been hard is the physical aspect. We altered our travel plans on Monday afternoon to leave PHX Tuesday afternoon instead of Tuesday late night. The difference was we got home 5 hours earlier. We had time to eat dinner, unpack our bags, shower, and generally relax before going to bed early. That made it easy to get up with my 6:45am alarm this morning and start back at work. Still, though, I'm glad it's only a 3 day workweek!

Cliff Dwellings & Subway Cave (Boynton Canyon, part 4)

Sedona Travelog #10
Sedona, AZ - Sun, 29 May 2022, 1pm

I've kind of been sneering at Subway Cave for being Instagram famous. Often such places are oversold; they're not as amazing in person as in carefully posed shots. And almost always they're over-touristed. Subway Cave is definitely over-touristed but I'm not sure it's oversold. In addition to the caves being fun to explore there are also ancient native cliff dwellings here.



In the photo above you can see remnants of two cliff dwelling rooms built into caves in the same stratum of rock. A caution about jumping to conclusions, though.... The walls you see may not be authentic. They may have instead been reconstructed by well-meaning scientists decades ago based on what they think the ancient Puebloan people would've done 800 years ago. That said, there is ample evidence elsewhere in this region that the ancients constructed such buildings. Some were built with many rooms and used as dwellings. Those with few rooms were often storage areas, possibly for when hunters or nomads moved around.



The two small caves with walls build in front of them are not the only caves here. RIght next to them are at least two larger caves, including the one in the photo above. Were these used as rooms, but the rock walls all fallen/removed in the intervening centuries? It's hard to say. When there's not physical evidence— and sadly, physical evidence has often been removed over the span of hundreds of years— we can only guess.

BTW, what did it entail crossing from the picturesque Subway Cave over to here? I had to "go around the horn":



In the photo above you can see 3 people going around the horn. Two of them are clinging to the wall because, yeah, it's a little scary there. The rock floor tilts away to a sheer fall of 50'.

Here's what this area looks like with a bit more context around it:



At the bottoms of the photo above you can see a pair of hikers deciding whether to ascend through the chute I climbed. If they make it up, they'll be at the rock stratum those other three hikers are clinging to.

How about the view to the side?



This is the view out the side canyon the Subway Caves are nestled in. I don't know if the ancient Puebloans lived here, but if they did this sure seems like a penthouse suite.