Sedona, Arizona

Where it sits. Sedona straddles the boundary between Yavapai and Coconino counties in central Arizona, at the mouth of Oak Creek Canyon where the Colorado Plateau breaks down into the Verde Valley. The town sits at about 1,320 m, roughly 45 km south of Flagstaff by the switchbacks of State Route 89A and 190 km north of Phoenix. It is ringed by red sandstone buttes and spires with names that have entered the local language - Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, Coffee Pot Rock, Capitol Butte, Snoopy Rock - and almost all of the land around the town is Coconino National Forest, which is why the buildings stop abruptly and the rock begins.

What built it. The red is the Schnebly Hill Formation, a Permian sandstone roughly 280 million years old, deposited in coastal dunes and tidal flats and stained by iron oxide coating the grains. Above it sits the buff Coconino Sandstone, a cross-bedded desert dune deposit, and a cap of hard Kaibab Limestone protects the highest buttes. The differing hardness of these layers gives the formations their stepped profile: sheer red cliff, pale band, blocky rim. Oak Creek runs year-round through a fault-controlled canyon to the north, supporting sycamore and cottonwood in a landscape that is otherwise juniper and prickly pear - a startling green thread in red rock.

The name and the town. There was no Sedona until 1902, when settler Theodore Schnebly applied for a post office and, after the authorities rejected the names he proposed as too long for a cancellation stamp, submitted his wife's first name instead. Sedona Schnebly's name now belongs to one of the most photographed small towns in the United States. Growth came slowly until the 1950s and then all at once; the population is around 10,000, and the visitor number is in the millions. From the 1980s the town also became a centre for New Age practice, built around four locations - Airport Mesa, Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock and Boynton Canyon - described as energy vortexes; the claim is unverifiable, the industry around it is very real, and the viewpoints in question happen to be genuinely excellent.

On screen. Sedona's film career started in 1923 with The Call of the Canyon, a Zane Grey adaptation directed by Victor Fleming and shot at Red Rock Crossing below Cathedral Rock. Somewhere between sixty and a hundred features followed during the western's golden age, the red rocks standing in for a generic frontier that never actually looked like this. John Wayne's Angel and the Badman (1947) and James Stewart's Broken Arrow (1950) worked these canyons; Nicholas Ray shot Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford here in late 1953, with Republic Pictures building a western town beneath a cliff and using Red Rock Crossing, Bell Rock, Boynton Canyon and Oak Creek Canyon; Delmer Daves filmed parts of the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957) in the same country. The Sedona International Film Festival, held each February, keeps that thread alive.

What you actually see today. The hiking is the reason to stay. Cathedral Rock Trail is a short, steep 2 km return scramble up a slickrock chute to a saddle between the spires; Devil's Bridge is a 6.4 km return walk to a natural sandstone arch you can stand on; Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte offer easy loops; and the West Fork of Oak Creek, 16 km north on 89A, is a 10 km return canyon walk crossing the creek repeatedly under 60 m walls - the finest walk in the region and cool in midsummer. Slide Rock State Park, an old apple farm on Oak Creek, has a natural sandstone chute that works as a water slide. The Chapel of the Holy Cross, completed in 1956 to a design conceived by sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude, is built directly into a red rock spur. Pink Jeep Tours has run four-wheel-drive trips onto the Broken Arrow trail since 1960.

Practical notes and timing. Parking is the real problem: most trailheads on national forest land require a Red Rock Pass or an interagency pass displayed in the vehicle, and the popular car parks fill before 8am at weekends in spring and autumn. A free shuttle serves the busiest trailheads and is much the easier option. Accommodation runs expensive across the board. March to May and September to November give daytime highs of 20C to 29C; July and August reach 37C with afternoon monsoon storms; winter is mild by day, frosty at night, and a snowfall on red rock is the local photographers' prize.