Sedona Vortexes

Sedona, Arizona sits at 1,311 metres in a red rock canyon landscape sculpted by 270 million years of erosion. The area was sacred to the Yavapai and Apache peoples long before European contact; they regarded the red rocks as an embodiment of their ancestral spirits. The modern vortex tradition emerged in the 1980s, based on claims by psychic Page Bryant that four sites — Airport Mesa, Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, and Boynton Canyon — are foci of spiralling energy fields rising from the earth.

New Age practitioners claim these vortexes are measurable as anomalies in electromagnetic readings (disputed by geologists) and that they amplify meditation, healing, and spiritual communication. Juniper trees near the vortex sites grow with pronounced spiral twisting that local guides attribute to the energy fields; geologists note that the twisting is consistent with the soil composition and prevailing wind patterns. Whether the vortexes are real or imagined, the landscape of Sedona is indisputably among the most visually extraordinary in North America.