By Kiran Jayasinghe
We woke up in rainy Sedona. It was really foggy, but you could still see the towering red rocks, or Moenkopi Sandstone, that Sedona is known for. Our mom had booked a Pink Jeep tour at 1 p.m. Since we had no plans we drove 5 minutes to uptown Sedona and walked around, for about two hours. Uptown Sedona has a lot of shops! We learned that Sedona was mostly a tourist city, and that was why there were so many shops! Most of the shops sold crystals and minerals, but we saw a Starbucks for the first time on our trip! I am sure there were many Starbucks cafes along the way, but this was the first one we had seen.
At 12:45 p.m., we headed toward the Pink Jeep store. At the store, a Pink Jeep Tour guide picked us up in a pink jeep and we headed toward the edge of the Colorado Plateau to visit the cliff dwellings of the Honanki people. The Pink Jeep was open on all sides. It was freezing cold, the temperature outside was about thirty five degrees, but with the jeep moving fast it was even colder, and it was raining! Soon we left the paved road and was driving on an unpaved, muddy, bumpy road. It was a pretty windy day as well. The jeep was pink when we started, but by the time we got to the Colorado Plateau it was completely brown with mud!
Our tour guide parked the Jeep, and we walked on a dirt trail ( or rather a trail that was a dirt trail and now was a mud trail ) to get to the cliff dwellings. We all got splattered with mud, but, being able to see the cliff dwelling of the Honanki people was well worth it! We all felt like tiny insects standing there next to the cliff!
Honanki Cliff Dwellings
Located near Sedona, the Honanki heritage site is open to the public seven days a week. Our guide said that the Pink Jeep Tours have teamed up with the park service to preserve the dwellings. The dwellings sit under a ledge of rock jutting out from the Colorado Plateau, keeping the area dry. This is probably why the Honanki people chose to build their houses there. Archeologists think that people lived here about 800 to 900 years ago. Today, only some of the brick and mud walls of the dwellings remain. Our guide said that some of the houses were two stories tall, but that early white settlers in the area had destroyed some of the houses for the lumber. We also saw some wall paintings, clan shields, and handprints, that are thought to have been made by the original people who lived at the site.
There were also some graffiti made by more modern people, and one of them made in 1926 even had a date! It would have been cool to touch some of the bricks they used for houses, but unfortunately there was a sign saying that if you touched anything that was used for the dwellings, you would be fined and have to spend 10 years in jail. Naturally, we didn’t touch anything. Besides, we didn’t want to damage the cliff dwellings!
After our fantastic pink jeep tour, we strolled through the shops in uptown Sedona again, and bought a few croissants and eclairs from the pink jeep cafe, since we hadn’t had any lunch. Our grandparent bought us beautiful bracelets and some Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory chocolate, which was delicious! We used to think See’s Candy was expensive, until we got to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. The chocolate was about two and a half times more than what we would have paid at See’s Candy for one truffle.
After a long, but exciting day in Sedona, we were glad to get back to our room to relax.
Find out more about Pink Jeep Tours.