Traveling with curiosity

And normalizing pre-travel research of a place's nature and original peoples

I’m going to Sedona, Arizona tomorrow. It’ll be my third trip there. It is both a work trip and a fun trip and I can’t tell you how excited I am to be in the presence of those incredible red rocks again. There’s something about them that feels otherworldly. No, I’m not talking about the “vortexes.” I’m talking about the rocks themselves.

They are sculpted by history and time in such a way that you have to look at them in awe. And that color! The brightness of the red and orange sandstone is just not of this world.

While this is my third trip there, I’ve realized that not once in the last 5 years since I first went there did I actually think about how those rocks and sculptures came to be the way they are today.

I’ll give myself some credit because I’ve learned a lot in the last half-decade about the human stamp on all places in North America, specifically the impact of Indigenous peoples. I learned on that first trip, which was also for work, about the work of the peoples of The Colorado Plateau to protect the land.

But as I prepare for this next trip, I realized that I never really learned about the land itself; about the geology. On my previous two visits—one with a then four-year-old mind you—I mostly just stood and walked in awe and took a whole lot of photos. On one trip where we were planning a conference for experiential educators, my colleagues and I discussed how we’d create engaging learning experiences for the attendees, yet I failed to do a whole lot of learning.

But since the last time I was there in 2021, I’ve been trying to become closer to nature by actually learning about it. And there’s nothing more epic than this planet’s geological history laid bare by the sandstone formations that now draw tourists in the thousands (along with crystals and vortexes and a lot of new-agey stuff that has nothing really to do with the actual history of the place).

The sunrise on Bell Rock

I’ll say this, I’m still learning and don’t have much to impart knowledge-wise. What this post is about is emphasizing that paying attention also goes with learning about a place. Learning about the peoples, and doing your homework.

I admit that I’m much more of an experiential learning kind of gal (and also why I worked in that area of higher education for years). But that’s all about experiential education is to do a little research in advance as a way to open your mind up to the questions that could arise.

Information is at our fingertips. I’m not saying one should be sitting at the base of the Bell Rock hike googling “sandstone formations,” but that hike could at least be a way to start wondering where all of this <gestures dramatically> comes from

I’m trying to be a better steward of this land and that requires knowing it. So on this trip, I’ll be practicing what I preached to my students for years: engage deeply with the place you’re in by asking questions, being open to not knowing the answer, and finding the sources of knowledge.