The Vortex

Sedona is one of those unexplainable western towns famous for, among other things, its red rocks. People come from all over the world to ride around the not-so-wild-anymore wilderness on Pink Jeep tours or hired helicopters. They take photos and videos and rush from one scenic overlook to the next, but with the next days plans and Route 66 already in mind.

I love to go places like Sedona, where you can't walk into a gas-station without seeing some kind of display of sandstone coasters with Kokopelli etched deep into the grain, or tee-shirts with lonely howling wolves. But my stomach can't handle it for too long before I feel like there's something wrong, as if something is missing. They say Sedona is one giant feel-good vortex, making it the center of the new age world but I always leave feeling a bit hollow.
I've only been to Sedona a few times and always to climb on its famous red rocks. It's a strange experience to be atop some 500 foot spire big enough for only a few people to stand and see a helicopter rise nearby and hover while its occupants take your picture. Meanwhile, the canyon floor crawls with Pink Jeeps and you feel, for the fleeting moments you're in Sedona's least trodden wilderness, that you're somehow famous.
A couple days ago I, along with my friend Spencer, made the short drive down Oak Creek Canyon from Flagstaff to the Anvil Boulders just outside Sedona. This stretch of 89 is always clogged with traffic and the pullouts are filled with rental cars, windows down, cameras out.
I had been to The Anvils once before and was impressed by the quality of the problems and the features on the stone. These boulders, however, are just across the creek from town and suffer, to a certain degree, the same fate as Stoney Point in Los Angeles, which by night becomes a favorite place to enjoy a forty of O.E. in one hand and practice tagging with the other.
The Anvils aren't as bad as Stoney, but the area was significantly more trashed now, just a year after I first visited. There were empty water bottles near every boulder and yards of old, discarded athletic tape drying into crusty fossils of the fingers they were once wrapped around. The Anvils already suffer from being so near town and 89. I find it disheartening to top out a problem and see a strip mall at the foot of some of America's most beautiful sandstone formations and to have a crude drawing of a cock a few inches from my face while I climb.

Since I last went to The Anvils someone has graced what I think to be the best and definitely most photogenic boulder with a plethora of drawings and words. We found a worn screw nearby the boulder, it's stripped head just poking out of the sand as if it had been left for the next artist to contribute to the mural. It's heartbreaking to know that, as show by the "Climb Hard" at the top of Crack Factory, the degradation of the area isn't from passers-by who don't know any better, but by climbers.
After we dropped our pads to walk around and decide what to climb, we ran into another group of climbers. I recognized a few of the teenagers from the gym in Flagstaff. As I said hello, I noticed an empty bottle of Ensure at my feet. I asked if it was theirs and if they were going to leave it there. They all seemed very threatened by Spence and I, like we were gun-carrying Arizona rednecks with a serious agenda for litterers. They eased up when they realized we too, were there to climb.  The group left and Spence and I warmed up on Lazor Cut and Free Willy, both of which are on some of the best rock at The Anvils.

The afternoon turned out to be quite a good one but was typical of Sedona. Private jets and helicopters few over at regular intervals and the drone of 89 became a static backdrop. We both climbed well; Spence got close on Alien Baby Left and did Sai Baba while I repeated Alien Baby right and did Big Sexy without too much trouble.
 The Anvils still have something to offer despite the trash and graffiti: really nice bouldering. This isn't the kind of place you go for a break from the city, it's the kind of place you go after work to drink beer and try to climb things. It's appropriate that The Anvils are the most popular place to boulder in Sedona; it is the geologic equivalent of a strip mall, a place you often go for its convenience, but isn't exactly the Taj Mahal.
The truly tragic thing about Sedona and The Anvils, and what always leaves me feeling hollow, is that both of them were once truly pristine, beautiful places. It's not that they're ugly now, but with the gaining popularity of places like Sedona and the bouldering world's feet growing larger while its shoes shrink, it's only a matter of time until your local crag is like Stoney Point or until it suffers a fate like that of the Mushroom Boulder in Hueco Tanks. It's an easy fate to avoid, and though I filled my pockets with trash and plan to take a trash bag when I go to The Anvils next, the scratched in graffiti won't fade for hundreds of years and there is nothing to be done about it.