Rare Desert SNOWSTORM Hits Famous Arizona Trail! (West Fork Oak Creek)

Well it's amazing how fast the weather can change here in Arizona. Just yesterday we were enjoying a beautiful sunny swim in some 72 degree water with no wetsuits and today in the mountains it is snowing. So we had several hikes planned for our first day here in Sedona. However, as you can see the weather had other plans so we decided to take a bit more of an easy hike. This is the West Fork of Oak Creek and it's like a paved trail. However, the trail is covered in snow right now. So an easy hike but not so easy considering the weather conditions. But hopefully we can still enjoy the beauty of West Fork Oak Creek here. It's 3.3 miles one way to the end of the trail. Not sure if we're going to do the whole thing. I guess it just depends on how slippery the trail is and how much time we want to spend out in the snow. Entering at your own risk. All right let's go. So the only thing that I'm a little concerned about is that we might not have the greatest visibility of the canyon. But nice to be out of the car after several hours of driving today. Even though it stopped for a while and then when we got higher up in elevation it picked up. Beautiful sandstone formations and yeah real beautiful. I don't even know if it's showing up on the video though. Could just be snow. It looks like there's a cave there. Is that man-made? Oh it's not. It looks like they framed like a doorway or something. It's pretty cool. Is there a way to get up there without busting your ass? Probably not. If you got long enough legs I guess. Okay so what'd they use this for? Food storage. I think I'm just gonna wait here while you finish the hike. How do you feel about that? Oh a bird just landed right there. It just landed right in front of your face. So you think this was, I think this was man-made. It looks like it was dug out of the rock. Look this this thing you think is natural? This shape it's like a square shape. There's no way this is natural. It has all these these points where they put like dynamite or tools or something. Yeah I'm pretty sure this was not natural. Yeah maybe it was a small opening and they made it bigger because there's a small opening here. Some old homestead thing. Oh this is the chicken coop. Oh yeah he's getting out of the snow. Hey birdie. I mean I don't know about this roof man. I don't know about being under this roof. It looks like it could collapse at any second. Recently someone commented on my videos why I never make any winter videos. I seem to make a lot of swimming hole videos and stuff like that. No winter adventures. And hey if that guy is still around watching my videos, this one's for you buddy. A winter escapade. A winter wonderland in the desert of Arizona. Although I'm not sure if this is still considered desert. Maybe high desert. Mountains outside of Sedona. It's been a while since I've been in the snow. So pretty cool. Not sure how it's gonna go setting up the tent in this The different minerals. The probably iron in there giving it that reddish orange color. doing this right now is the cliffs which are kind of the main attraction are somewhat obscured. But it is pretty magnificent when you see them poking through the mist and poking through the snow-covered trees. It is a quite a treat to behold. But in terms of elevation gain I mean this is really cruisy. A few creek crossings so far but they weren't so bad. I definitely would rather do this now than probably tomorrow when it's supposed to get up to 61 again. And this is going to be all muddy. So it's nice to have that relatively clean snow walking. A little bit of blue sky poking out up here too. So it's turning out to be a magnificent day. Surprisingly a good amount of people on the trail today. I think we've passed about 10 people coming out. So good to see people getting out there. I was just telling Sam we have a lot of things we want to do in this area so we probably wouldn't even have done this hike had the weather not changed our plans. So I'm pretty grateful that it did because this is stunningly beautiful. One thing I forgot to mention is that the America the Beautiful Interagency Pass does not get you into this trailhead. It is operated by a private concessionaire so you have to pay 15 bucks for day use or they have a three site pass. They manage two other sites in the area for 25. Just something else to keep in mind if you come out here to West Fork Oak Creek. So in case it wasn't obvious, I do not agree with privatizing the trailheads of public lands. It is something that our government is increasingly doing including back in LA. I heard that they're privatizing the Vincent Gap parking area even if you have the Adventure Pass now. Still have to pay to use that so you know it kind of sucks. I guess the argument is that since they're cutting the budgets of the national parks and national forest that they wouldn't be able to give the level of service to these popular trailheads and thus they would stay in a state of disrepair and they might potentially have to close them to public access. So if that is the only alternative, opening it to a private concessionaire, obviously I'll take that over closing it or letting it turn into a shithole. But in general, privatizing public lands I do not agree with. So it looks like this narrow canyon pool is the end of the maintained trail and you can keep hiking although it would be wading through this through the water through the slot canyon. Maybe it gets drier when it's warmer and if you wanted to hike back here you have to keep going two and three quarter miles past this point there was a sign up ahead that said that. So two and three quarters past this up through the slot and I imagine there's kind of like a beachy shoreline area where you can camp and this canyon continues another 10 or 11 miles up into the red rock secret canyon wilderness so would be a pretty awesome backpacking trip for sure. Although not really in the mood to trudge through this water knee deep possibly deeper in this cold water right now but what a beautiful slot canyon this is. Not bad for an unexpected adventure on a snowy day here in Arizona. Hopefully plenty more coming from Arizona but in the meantime get out there find your adventure and be infamous. Infamous.