Saturday May 4, 18.2mi/29.3km

Old Bradshaw Ranch (32.9/4580ft) to Jordan Trail TH (49.9/4480ft) (Arizona) +1.2mi Sedona connector

I left my hidden little camp spot at 6:15am, and in a few minutes I was on a roadwalk. Within a mile, I was on top of a hill and had a phone signal to call my brother for his birthday. After I descended the hill, I came around the corner and saw a couple of small animals crossing the road in the distance. Foxes!

Now that the sun was higher up in the sky, it illuminated all the nearby cliffs, the colors really glowed.

Soon I left the dirt road, and had a short section of cross country hiking through a meadow with all these purple flowers. There had to be thousands of them. Neat!

After a little while I joined a very old road, it had been taken over by grasses and shrubs but wide and flat and easy to walk.

The views never got old.

I came to a spot where a trail crossed a small residential road and somebody had defaced the sign with one of these stickers. Ugh.

Supposedly there was a pond a couple minutes up the road, but there was a gate with a bunch of private property signs, and eventually a nosy guy came around in a jeep to point out the private property signs. Sedona is beautiful, but he didn’t make a good first impression of the people here. All the trails in this area are very popular with mountain bikers, and I saw a few dozen of them today.

Some of the trails had really funny names like this one.

Canyon of Fools?!

More bikers!

The trail started off in this deeply eroded trench, which I guess mountain bikers find fun, but it was really just a very narrow hallway of dirt.

Mescal Mountain up ahead.

The trail went right up onto a slickrock shelf on the side of Mescal Mountain, which was pretty cool.

I hiked the entire slickrock traverse, and then found myself a shaded spot under a juniper tree and watched all the hikers and bikers go by.

Pretty darn good scenery today.

After another mile I left the popular trail network, and entered the Dry Creek Valley. Much to my happy surprise, I even found a couple deep pools of water, where I was able to refill my almost empty water bottles.

I very gradually climbed up out of the valley….

… Higher up my head cold use of the mountain to the south of me, Soldier Heights.

This is one of the funniest signs I’ve ever seen on trail, someone installed an entire post just to mount a tiny square of wood with a tiny arrow.

I got to the top of Brins Mesa, and had amazing views in all directions, and especially towards Sedona to the South.

It was an easy 500-ft descent toward the trailhead on a very wide and obviously popular trail.

When I got to the Jordan Trail junction, I was officially done with section 1, and I hiked a little ways on the connector trail to the town of Sedona.

I found a very nice and very hidden camp spot underneath a juniper tree. Sweet.

Tomorrow I will walk the last mile to the road, and then catch a $1 bus to town where I will do a resupply. I’ll walk out of town in the afternoon to avoid spending $500 on a motel room, it’s crazy how expensive Sedona can be.