Resting Up after Boyton Canyon & Subway Caves

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

Whew. Today has been a busy day. We got up at 6am and packed for a hike at Boynton Canyon. What was supposed to be a 6 mile hike stretched to almost 9 miles with spur-of-the-moment side trips. After chasing butterflies (literally) looking for Subway Cave we found Subway Cave.

I already posted 4 blog entries about today's hike and could easily do at least one more... but after a while all the red rock mountains tend to blur together. It's like being drunk on beauty; you see it but can't taste it anymore.

Feeling drunk on beauty is what it was like the last few miles of the hike today. Half the time we were focused on putting one foot in front of the other and getting home, knowing we'd "seen all this already". The other half of the time we looked up and marveled, "OMG, we're still here and it's beautiful."

We got back to the trailhead around 2:15. We'd been on the trail for just over 7 hours, hiking roughly 9 miles and at least 1,600' of ascent. So we were hungry. We stopped at a taqueria in town and demolished some food. Then we came back to the hotel and chilled out in our room.

We've been in our room most of the day since then. We're too tired even to use the hot tub. We went out for a late supper after 8 and then got a few drinks back at the hotel bar. Now it's 10pm and time to get to bed. We've got another 6am start tomorrow!

Hiking to the Birthing Cave

Sedona Travelog #11
Mescal Mountain, Sedona, AZ - Mon, 30 May 2022, 9:15am

Once again today we got an early start. Alarm was set for 6am, we left the hotel at 7, and we were at the trailhead on the far side of Sedona at 8. Morning traffic wasn't that bad (it's a miles-long traffic jam midday) so we even had time for a stop at a local bakery for cinnamon rolls and danish to supplement our otherwise sensible breakfast of meat, cheese, and fruit.

Today we're not sure how much hiking we're up for. Yesterday's epic 9 mile, 1600'+ ascent hike really wore us out. I'm only walking straight this morning because I gobbled Ibuprofen. But at least a dose of pills works. It's not like when we hiked the Koko Head Tramline in Hawaii. After that I was wrecked for several days. Today I'm out hiking again, not hanging around the resort, wincing and limping. But we've selected an easier trail to start with, the Birthing Cave.

The Birthing Cave is another Instagram famous hike in Sedona. It's good for today because it's easy— a roundtrip of about 2 miles with an ascent of only a few hundred feet. Plus, as our experience with the Subway Cave yesterday showed us, the Instagram hiking noobs are not out first thing in the morning.



The Birthing Cave is on a flank of Mescal Mountain. We started by hiking the Long Canyon trail to an unmarked trail junction 0.6 miles. The funny thing was that though the junction was unmarked, the side trail to the cave was obviously way more heavily used than the continuation of the main trail. That's Instagram-famous for you.

The spur trail took us in toward Mescal Mountain. Then another spur led up to the cave halfway up the side of the mountain.



The last few hundred feet to Birthing Cave was a bit of a scramble. It was no trouble for us, with good hiking boots and skill navigating rough terrain, but all the Instagram-following hiking noobs cautioned us about how slippery it was.

And yes, there were a bunch of noobs there. The trail was peaceful but once we got within 100' of the cave we could hear the clatter. It sounded like a cocktail party up in there.



The idea of the Birthing Cave is that it looks like a womb from the inside, I've read. My memory doesn't go back as far as the one time my head was inside a womb looking out so I have to use my imagination here, but yeah, I can see that.



We found perches on the steeply slanted rock walls inside the cave— yay, hiking boots again— and waited for the noisier folks to leave. Thankfully they did. We never had the cave alone, even being out here relatively early in the morning, but at least we were able to enjoy it without people sporting fashion-accessory matched dogs nattering on about vortexes and crystals.

Soon it was time even for us to leave. Both of us were feeling pretty good despite yesterday's taxing hike. We decided to extend this one and see how far the spur trail goes.

Stay tuned to see what we found next!