Sedona, Arizona
Photo Credit: Lost the Path
Sedona, Arizona September 12-19, 2026
A return visit, a gifted book, and rain on red rock
This was our seventh trip to Sedona since 2018, and our fourth stay with the same Airbnb host — which by now feels less like booking a rental and more like coming back to a place that knows us. The studio still feels like a second home. Her cat, Spicy, claimed the back deck with us again, the way he does every year, curling up for breakfast in the morning and reappearing right on cue when the sun hit the rocks in the evening.
What changed this year was the weather. It rained. Real thunderstorms, rolling across the desert in a way we've never quite seen there before. After so many dry, blinding-bright Septembers, watching the red rocks turn dark and glossy in wet air made the whole place feel like somewhere new, even after seven trips.
We didn't try to cover new ground just for the sake of it. We followed books that kept finding each other, a mesa we hadn't climbed since a rattlesnake sent us scrambling down it in the dark, and a shop owner in Jerome who'd put a signed piece of history in my hands the year before.
Brewer Trail and Airport Loop
We started late morning, which is exactly the right call when you're still shaking off both the time change and the elevation. The trailhead is close enough to the Airbnb to walk to, so it became our easing-in hike, the one that doesn't ask too much of you on day one.
We'd last walked this mesa back in 2023, at dusk. That was the night we met a rattlesnake on the way back down and finished the descent in the dark, hearts pounding, moving a lot faster than we probably looked graceful doing. I have photos now of the exact spot — taken this time in full daylight — and the snake was closer to the trail than it ever felt in the moment.
This year: warm, windy, no snake in sight. Small planes landed on the mesa's little airstrip while we walked. The view was the whole reason we kept coming back to this trail anyway — Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, the entire bowl of town laid out below — and getting to take it in without that old spike of fear in my chest felt like its own kind of closure. That was enough for one hike.
Bookstores
ALT Books and Records sits up a narrow staircase in Tlaquepaque, all used books and vinyl in that particular secondhand-shop hush. My husband pulled a copy of Jim Hogshire's Opium for the Masses off the shelf and, for one hopeful minute, was sure he'd found a scarce original. It was a reprint. We bought it anyway — some finds are worth it just for the moment of thinking you've struck gold, and we'll remember the stairs and the look on his face either way.
The timing turned out almost too perfect. I was in the middle of reading Michael Pollan's This Is Your Mind on Plants at the time, and Pollan writes at length about Hogshire's book. Some souvenirs are objects. This one was a coincidence I got to keep instead.
Pink Nomad Books and Gifts is new to Uptown Sedona — new and used titles, easy to browse, a genuinely pleasant stop. I left empty-handed this time, which is fine. Not every shop has to send a book home with you.
In Flagstaff we circled back to Bright Side Bookshop, one of our regular stops, and my husband found another title that fit the week's accidental theme: Psychoactive Plants and Fungi by Liam Engel. Two bookstores, two books about plants, one cactus collector getting more serious about his hobby by the day.
On the way home we stopped at The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, same as last year. This time I walked out with a signed copy of Karin Slaughter's The Secrets We Hide, the second North Falls novel. Last year it was the first in the series, We Are All Guilty Here, also signed. It's starting to feel like a small tradition now — same store, same author, the next book always waiting for us when we pass through.
Jerome
We've come to genuinely adore this little town clinging to the side of the mountain.
Before we even walked into Jerome Heritage Shop, we swung by the original plot where the Cuban Queen Bordello once stood. Windy is turning the site into a small hotel — three rooms, a space for making art, furniture she's been collecting from around the world, and some of the best unbroken views of Sedona's red rocks anywhere in town. We peeked in the windows like a couple of kids. It's coming along beautifully.
We recognized Windy the moment we walked into the shop. We talked about the book she'd given me last year — The Ghost of the Cuban Queen Bordello by Peggy Hicks, the history of Jerome, the madam, Jelly Roll Morton and all of it. I'd read it and written about it before this trip, so walking back in this year felt like finishing a sentence I'd started twelve months earlier. You can read my book review here.
Windy told us Peggy Hicks is fully retired now. She still owns the retail space, but closed her actual shop after tourists harassed her over a display they found offensive. We also talked our way to the jewelry store where the Cuban Queen bought the diamond Jelly Roll had set into his front tooth — a detail so strange and specific I still can't quite get over it. I have a photo of that shop now, too.
Arizona Botanical Gardens
At the bottom of the mountain sits Clarkdale and the Arizona Botanical Gardens, a place I'd been trying to get my husband through the gate of for years. He's become a genuine cactus grower and collector over the last couple of seasons, and this was finally the year it clicked.
The grounds are a real garden, not just a nursery—cactus planted straight into the earth, paths winding between them, greenhouses you can wander into and come back out of holding something alive. He chose a four-year-old saguaro. They grow so slowly that he can keep it in a pot for the rest of our lives and it still won't be anything close to a giant by the time we're gone. We brought a little piece of Arizona home with us in a pot, and it already has a spot picked out next to the rest of his collection.
Home
Same host, same deck. Spicy in our laps at breakfast and again when the light hit the rocks in the evening. Rain in the desert when we least expected it, a reprint that collided with the exact book I happened to be reading, a signed Slaughter to keep last year's stack going, a saguaro riding home in the suitcase, and a conversation in Jerome that could only have happened because of a gift given a year before.
And now we're glad to be home with Nikolette, my reading partner.
Nikolette with the books that came home. She has opinions about being left out of the itinerary.
If you'd like more Sedona, here are the Adventure posts from our last two trips:
One final note: some of the pictures included in this adventure blog post were taken by my husband. I’ve given him credit by noting his website title, Lost the Path, on some of his photos. You can visit his website here.
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