5in29: Day 19-20

Jan 02, 2025

Attraction #1: Flagstaff Historical Downtown

This is a city I never heard of. It has a population of 76,586 in 2023. Flying to Sedona means you are likely flying to Flagstaff, then driving to Sedona. So I wondered if I actually did fly here then driving to Sedona many many years ago.
Its historical downtown is a neat place with many eating and showing places.
Across the street from Downtown is an old train station that is now a visiting center. And guess what I found??

By now, you’d understand why it comes with an exclamation mark. I-40 runs through Flagstaff, so was Route 66.
Besides the usual postcards, signs, etc. inside the visiting center, there is a huge sign printed on the ground outside. What is unique about this sign is that it has wings.
We also saw other unique signs of Route 66.

Who didn’t know about or of Sedona? Anyone hiked there? Which mountains or trials?
We arrived in Sedona via 89A, and what a fun ride it was—one of the most tight zip-zagging mountain roads I have been,
The city sign with apple trees surprised me. I did some digging and found out that apple trees have a significant historical connection to Sedona. Despite its current reputation for its red rock landscapes and spiritual vortexes, Sedona is once a prominent apple-growing region in Arizona.
The uptown was crowded with tourists. I recognized that I had lunch here many years ago with my colleague and PhD students when we were having a conference in town.
This time, we didn’t visit any art stores or restaurants here in uptown. I only got coffee and we both got berry smoothies. But we walked and took photos and just enjoyed the pleasant weather, red surrounding sceneries, and art statues and store decorations.
We drove to the famous church on red rock, but didn’t get to climb to it because there was no where to park our van after slowly moving to the parking lot for almost 30 mins. The photo I took is satisfyingly break-taking.

Not hiking Sedona will make me regret.
On the next day, we came back to the city after a night boondocking in the Coconino National Forest Dispersed Camping site on Forest Road 525 to hike the Thunder Mountain’s Sugarloaf and Tea Cup loops.
It was cold in the morning but warmed up quickly. The difficult levels vary throughout. We reached the Sugarloaf Summit, then turned to the Tea Cup loop to reach the bottoms of the peaks we had taken photos from the Sugarloaf Summit.
We'd hiked longer than 2 hours 50 mins if it was not because we did have a place to go that afternoon.
I have a sense that if I lived near by, I might hike all the hiking places in Sedona.