Backpacking Trip in Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness, Sedona, Arizona
The Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness is one of the prettiest Wilderness Areas I’ve seen in my life and so it was an easy decision to do a backpacking trip there. I was a little worried that it would be busy as the Wilderness has some of the busiest trails I have ever seen, but thankfully those fears didn’t turn out to be true.
Our targeted route would look like a lollipop with a detour to an arch. We started out hiking on the Chuckwagon mountain biking trail until we hit Dry Creek Road. The views from Chuckwagon are some of my favorite in Sedona. One we hit the road, we unfortunately did have to walk on the dirt road for over a mile, but it went by quickly as it was fairly flat. When we hit the trailhead for Vultee Arch, we stashed our heavy backpacking packs and hiked up to Vultee Arch. Ironically, our favorite part of this detour was the view we had from the arch, not of the arch itself. The geography in that area is truly beautiful. After a snack break at the arch, we headed back to our backpacks and turned onto Dry Creek Trail. From here, our route wasn’t set in stone as we were going to decide where to camp that night based on what we felt like doing in that moment.
While I would have loved to continue down Dry Creek Canyon, we decided to turn left onto Bear Sign Trail (sorry Mom). We continued along the creek bed with the trail going back and forth across the dry creek bed several times. We did not see any signs of bear. When we intersected the David Miller Trail, we decided to turn left onto that trail and walk towards Secret Canyon because at this point we thought we would be camping in that canyon. Before we made it to Secret Canyon, we found a campsite that we couldn’t resist.
While setting up camp, I fell onto an agave plant and holy moly, I did not realize how sturdy those plants are. I found myself with about 6 puncture wounds on my thigh and butt. When I looked at the plant I fell on, you couldn’t even tell I had fallen on it with not one of the leaves even being bent a millimeter. While painful, I am very happy that I didn’t have a vital organ land on the plant as it could surely puncture a lung. I did feel a little lightheaded after the incident and needed to lay down for 15 minutes to warm back up and feel normal. Turns out their sap is poisonous and people can be allergic, but I was fine after a little rest. The puncture wounds did take about a month to heal up though and were badly bruised for ~2 weeks. It was quite a lesson to learn the hard way…avoid agave!
Anyway, the campsite had some wonderful views, and we enjoyed being able to look out over much of the wilderness. The sunset was one of my favorites I’ve ever seen. The next morning, we ate breakfast, delayed packing up camp as much as we could as we enjoyed our spot for a little longer, and headed towards Secret Canyon. We again stashed our packs at the intersection with the canyon and decided to do a detour down the canyon for 1-2 miles. It’s clearly a popular backpacking spot with plenty of established sites, but none of them were occupied.
When we got back to our backpacks, we finally saw the first people we had seen since the mountain bikers we saw on Chuckwagon the day before. We passed a handful of day hikers on our way out, but no other backpackers. We ultimately hit Dry Creek Road again and walked back on that to the Chuckwagon turnoff. We made it back to the car without any more incidents. This was one of my favorite overnight backpacking trips I’ve done.
Day 1 stats: 10.4 miles, 1650 vert
Day 2 stats: 7.8 miles, 200 vert
Total stats: 18.2 miles, 1850 vert
