Sedona

34.8697°N, 111.7610°W.

Red rock landscape in Yavapai County, north-central Arizona, set within the Coconino National Forest at the mouth of Oak Creek Canyon. The exposed sandstone cliffs are the Permian-age Schnebly Hill Formation, deposited roughly 270 million years ago when the area sat at the edge of an inland sea; iron oxide weathering gives the formation its characteristic red colour. Sedona was named in 1902 when settler Theodore Schnebly registered the post office and submitted his wife's first name. Boynton Canyon, Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, and Airport Mesa are the four landmarks most consistently identified in twentieth-century guidebooks as Sedona points of interest. The town's modern reputation as a destination dates to the 1980s metaphysical tourism boom catalysed by author Page Bryant. Yavapai and Apache oral tradition treats the canyon as ancestral ground long predating Anglo arrival.

Few towns in the United States have so completely traded their geology for their mythology.