5/29/09 Apocalypse Hunters, Slide Rock State Park & Roundabouts

My friend, Fox The Poet, blog-posted the best article I’ve read concerning the surge of misinformation about 2012 and apocalypse hunters currently employing people’s imaginations to recruit followers (and dollars). (It's a piece by Ron Rosenbaum from Slate.com) Here's a link. Should be required reading for anyone easily charmed by mysticism -- if you reside in northern AZ, that might include you. Just sayin’.

Memorial Day weekend kept Sedona busy. At one point, Officer Potts almost ran out of spaces to send the tour busses for parking. Restaurants managers loved that. For retail, Saturday was less-than-great, with tourists doing their browsing rather than buying. Sunday and Monday, however, were very nice. On the negative, I heard a stories of traffic hold ups coming into town via Oak Creek Canyon (89A north) from Flagstaff. Reason? One of Sedona’s biggest attractions is Slide Rock State Park, nature’s version of a water park, where folks can slip-slide along the water-polished boulders, through waves and along strips of slippery red rock. Slide Rock is especially popular with Phoenix-area visitors; however, there is limited parking at Slide Rock. On busy days (3 day weekends in the summer), if you’re not in a Slide Rock parking spot by 11AM, you should probably find something else to do. Some people are persistent, however, and will park their vehicle in the highway and wait for someone to leave the park so that they can enter. Well, one car sitting in the middle of the road leads to another, then another, next thing you know, everybody assumes it’s a legitimate line. Traffic stops. The line backs up for miles with people just trying to get into Sedona, not Slide Rock, and finally the cops have come out to tell people what should be obvious. “Don’t just park your car in the road, people.”

Not a big deal, but: Roundabouts. OK, I eat my words. Back before Sedona’s roundabouts were put in, I was quoted in the newspaper as supporting them. Hummm. Well, I still like the little roundabouts between Village of Oak Creek and Sedona, but the large (er) ones at the “Y” (Sedona’s primary intersection, where 89A and Hwy 179 meet) aren’t working. Sedona is supposed to be a stress-free zone, and the roundabouts at the Y are, well, anger generators. The “Y” Roundabouts are too small to utilize turning lanes and too big to employ one-lane-for-everything. Consequently, everyone who fancies himself a good driver is convinced that “the other people” are in the wrong lane, and off go the horns. Note the bits of paint and broken glass at every entrance to the Y Roundabouts. These roundabouts are likely to be here for another five years -- usually takes that long for a bureaucracy to realize they’ve been Shanghai-Surprised. In the meantime, do as I do and be cautious as you go through the Y. Just because someone isn’t in the turning lane, doesn’t mean they’re not going to turn. As I mentioned above, there isn’t really a turning lane -- well, for a couple yards, there is, but then there isn’t -- and the roundabouts are too small to assume anyone can switch lanes before their exit; that, multiplied by two -- soon to be three roundabouts in a row -- makes for nervous tourists. On the plus side, Roundabouts DO reduce the number of fatal accidents. On the minus, they certainly increase the number of road-rage murders. Nevertheless, roundabouts ARE safer than traditional intersections. As I remind myself of that, I guess I still support them … while encouraging everyone, especially locals, to be patient with tourists encountering these circuitous “situations” for the first time.

Some friends and I are going on a Jerome, AZ adventure Saturday. I'll plan to take some snapshots and blog on that next time. Blog more soon. -- Mike