Traveling Unplugged: Getting Lost in the Red Rocks

In the day and age of 24/7 connectivity getting away is never truly getting away.

To do that, you have to travel and also learn to unplug. I’m by no means a pro when it comes to avoiding social media, not checking emails, muting text messages and steering clear of sports scores when I travel but I recently took some baby steps while visiting one of my favorite places.

The eye-popping Red Rocks of Sedona, Arizona is a tourist hotspot so while it may appear otherworldly it’s hardly off the beaten path. Nonetheless, there are miles and miles of scenic hiking and biking trails where you ditch the crowds of Uptown and the city’s most famous landmarks like Cathedral Rock and Devil’s Bridge.

Your phone will come in handy for capturing photos for your memory bank but otherwise, a signal will be tough to come by, and the stunning landscape will do the seemingly impossible of distracting you from your handheld device.

While I’m not big into crystals or vortexes it’s clear spending time in places like Sedona that many people are and that they draw real benefits from their interest in them. And I imagine that this desire to connect with the natural world must make it easier to disconnect from the two-dimensional world on your screen.

Enough studies have shown that spending too much time on our phones and being connected online is more often than not bad for our mood and mental well-being. Being aware of that fact as you scroll Instagram is one thing but doing something about it is another entirely.

That’s where travel can come in and relieve some of the anxiety that builds with being offline in 2024.

For many people, that happy place is in nature, whether hiking through the mountains, floating on a sun-kissed lake or staring into the sea while lounging on a beach.

In my experience in the Red Rocks, staying unplugged would have been a piece of cake if not needing my phone from time to time to snap pictures. But even after spending hours hiking through gorgeous red sand trails, it was easy to avoid my phone in the charming Village of Oak Creek just a few minutes south.

The locals in this laidback community are quite welcoming and a bar seat at a popular BBQ restaurant netted plenty of friendly conversation as a substitute for the remarkable landscape outside.

Back at our Airbnb, a balcony facing the magnificent buttes and mesas from atop a hill was more than enough reason to leave my phone on the charger long into the night when the clear skies and lack of light pollution make for some exceptional stargazing.

There are many reasons I can’t wait to get back to this place someday but the ability to unplug so effortlessly might be the new number one.

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