We’re the first winter storm of 2021 now behind us, we can analyze what we learned from this first downpour of rain, then sleet and snow.
The Sedona area got around 3.66 inches of precipitation in this storm, though the University of Arizona’s Rainlog varies widely depending on where in Sedona the rain gauges are with some portions of the Village of Oak Creek and Oak Creek Canyon getting more and parts of West Sedona and the Chapel area getting less.
In any case, 3.6 inches is well over one-third what we got in the entire year of 2020.
The first three days of rain set the stage for several days of snow, which began falling late Saturday and early Sunday. My wife and I took our toddler up Oak Creek Canyon to play in the snow and — after getting briefly stuck in the thick, soft snow at Cave Springs until we were helped out by some friendly tourists — played in the light snowfall at Manzanita Campground.
Of course all that was just an appetizer — literally, because all our daughter wanted to do was eat snow — to the mass snowfall entree we got early this week.
The snow fell in earnest Monday afternoon. Roads up hills, especially westbound State Route 89A along Cooks Hill was the biggest trouble for most residents heading from Uptown to West Sedona especially working class Sedonans and Uptown’s Verde Valley workers trying to get home to Cottonwood, Cornville, Clarkdale and Page Springs.
Meanwhile, eastbound State Route 89A from Lower Red Rock Loop Road up to Sedona Red Rock High School was the most difficult areas for drivers to deal heading from the Verde Valley into Sedona. Numerous vehicles were stuck or stranded heading uphill and drifting off the roadway, waiting for snowplows to come along and make the roads a bit more drivable.
Fortunately, we had very few serious accidents in this storm, perhaps because it came on more slowly than some other major snowstorms of the last decade or because — after a year with almost no rain nor snow, drivers were overly cautious and less reckless.
Approximately four snowplows were working in the Sedona area to clear arterial streets, but many drivers still had difficulty going up and down Cooks Hill on State Route 89, further emphasizing the need for some alternate route, rather than a wicked steep incline and decline that every driver heading from Uptown to West Sedona must navigate to go anywhere.
With the new Sedona City Council’s renewed vigor to ignore neighborhood concerns in favor of the greater good — be it installing a sidewalk along Sanborn and Thunder Mountain roads or bike paths in the Chapel area, or building an extension of Forest Road, residents could hope.
The Forest Road extension may help loosen congestion at the Ranger Road and Y roundabouts, but from where it intersects with State Route 89A to Airport Road, it’s still just one roadway every Sedona resident, every visitor, every emergency vehicle and delivery truck must take to go from east to west.
This new council might be willing to actually build an alternate route between West Sedona and Uptown, but the chances are slim. Cutting down a tree, building a sidewalk or extending a bike path while irking a neighborhood is far less substantial buying land for a new road and then actually building it.
Come Tuesday afternoon, the arterial roads through Sedona were mainly open and semi-passable, but the residential roads questionable.
Some workers, including those in our newsroom had to be picked up by employees with four-wheel drive and all-terrain tires on their normally navigable residential streets.
The bigger concern was not the longtime Sedona residents who are used to the snow but the out-of-town tourists and the Sedona residents who have moved here in the last year and a half, expecting a high desert Sedona, rather than the snowstorm flurry we were dealt earlier this week.
Late afternoon snow is predicted on Friday, Jan. 29, but it might be the last storm for quite sometime unless a cold snap and storm front merge in February or March.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
