Red Rock Reverence: Visiting Sedona’s Chapel of the Holy Cross

When the morning light first finds the red buttes of Sedona it slides like warm glass across the face of the Chapel of the Holy Cross. You arrive with a handful of other early risers: a photographer setting up a tripod, a couple with coffee in hand, a solitary traveler who looks at the stone like an old friend. The chapel is not a mountaintop retreat reachable only after a long slog — it is built into the rock itself, a human voice pressed into an ancient landscape. From the parking lot a short paved walk and a few ramps deliver you to a vantage point where the chapel’s vertical cross seems to grow right out of the sandstone, a clean slash against strata that remember a tropical sea and eons of wind.