Cathedral Rock is a group of red sandstone spires standing over Oak Creek in northern Arizona, above the town of Sedona. The colour is rust. These were dunes 280 million years ago, and every grain in them is coated with iron. A grey band low in the towers is limestone, left behind when the sea came back for a while and drowned the dune field. The picture everybody has seen comes from one bank. At Red Rock Crossing you wade a few steps over flat streambed stones and line the spires up squarely with their double in the water. It only works when Oak Creek runs low and still; monsoon runoff leaves the water high and brown. The bank fills with tripods an hour before the sun goes.
The rock itself is a short, steep climb. The trail leaves the desert floor and goes straight up bare sandstone, narrowing near the top into a chute you haul yourself through on hands and boots. The saddle at the end sits right between the towers, with the Verde Valley far below you and wind pouring through the gap. The Hiline bench runs nearly five kilometres along a shelf above that valley, narrow enough in places that the drop is a step away from you. It ends under the west face — the side the famous photograph never shows. Nearby, an easy loop rings the foot of Bell Rock and a longer one goes round Courthouse Butte behind it. North of town the West Fork trail crosses its stream thirteen times in five and a half kilometres, where bigtooth maples hold their orange into late October. This is also one of four places in Sedona where people sit on the ledges to feel what they call energy rising out of the ground. As for the name, it is in the wrong place. Early maps called this formation Court House Rock, and a government mapmaker swapped the labels with the butte a few kilometres east. The swap stuck, so the rounded butte beside Bell Rock still answers to a courthouse it looks nothing like.