A Calendar in the Rock: Road-trip to Sedona

A Calendar in the Rock: Road-trip to Sedona

By Armando Ortiz

We left Los Angeles thinking Sedona would be good for hikes and photographs. Red rock formations. Winter light. Trails that look romantic even before you adjust the colors on your phone. 

That was the plan — make Sedona our base and branch out. On a map, everything feels close. In the desert, distance widens. Hours stretch. Roads thin out. A day can disappear behind a windshield.

So we narrowed the circle. We would stay with Sedona. Let it be enough.

We arrived the first week of January. Rain had passed through the night before, and the air carried that cold clarity that follows a desert storm. The red earth looked darker than it does in photographs. The silence did not feel empty. It felt layered.

At Palatki, cliff dwellings rest inside sandstone walls as if they grew there. Pictographs remain — figures, markings, a silhouette that held my attention longer than I expected. I found myself wondering who it represented. The not knowing felt appropriate.

But it was at the Crane Petroglyph site where something shifted. 

The ranger pointed to a series of etched markings along the cliff wall. At first they looked like many of the others — lines, shapes, fragments of intention. Then he explained that some archaeologists believe they functioned as a calendar. A way of tracking seasons. Movement. Planting cycles.

He said it plainly. Not as a grand claim. Just as possibility.

I stood there looking at the stone differently.

A calendar is not decoration. It is attention stretched across years. It is someone watching the sun closely enough to notice patterns, and patient enough to record them. It requires repetition. It requires memory.

On the walk back, we talked about it — about seasons, about how much observation it would take to live that closely with land and sky. The conversation was easy. But something in me had gone quieter. 

We use the word primitive too easily.

The ranger hadn’t argued that point directly, but the idea hovered there. Ancient becomes simple. Simple becomes inferior. Entire civilizations are reduced to survival stories.

Yet what I had just seen was study. Deliberate marking. Knowledge fixed in stone.

The next day, driving north toward Wupatki National Monument, the land widened into lava fields and open sky. In the background, the ever-present San Francisco Peaks rose like silent beings. The pueblos rise there from volcanic soil in a landscape of extremes — scorching summers, freezing winters, little water, relentless wind. Stone construction was not accidental; it was intelligent. It held heat. It endured. It answered the climate.

We admire the terraces of China and the agricultural engineering of the Inca Empire in Peru. We call those remarkable adaptations to demanding landscapes. Here too, there are traces of altered terrain and cultivated maize – signs of people working carefully with soil, shadow, and season.

At Walnut Canyon National Monument, homes carved into limestone cliffs stretch along what is now called the Island Trail. One dwelling becomes several. Several become many. What first appears isolated reveals itself as community. I imagined late afternoon settling into the canyon – smoke rising gently, hovering at the edge of the plateau, voices carrying across stone, the ordinary rhythm of preparing a meal, a child crying at a distance.

The ordinary is what endures. 

What unsettled me was not the age of these places. It was the quiet evidence of attention — architectural, agricultural, communal – embedded in them.

Sedona did not become a launching point for somewhere else. It became a place that made me slow down long enough to reconsider a word I had rarely questioned. 

We arrived looking for scenery.

We left still thinking.