Have you done the Bear Mountain 500? Gordon Cantor has — and as far as anyone in Sedona can tell, he may be the only one who has.
On March 20, Cantor made his 500th ascent of the 6,494-foot-high mountain since moving to Sedona in 2018.
“I really don’t know if other people have done that or not,” Cantor said. “There are some other odd folks who I think do it on a regular basis, but I’m not sure myself … I once tried to google it but I couldn’t tell.”
Cantor was formerly a neurologist in Manhattan, where his wife Antigoni Axenidou was director of the General Legal Division of the Office of Legal Affairs at the United Nations, before relocating to Sedona.
“I got interested in hiking, I guess, in my late 30s. Whenever I had a vacation I was usually coming out West, and I finally cajoled my wife into moving out West with me once we retired,” Cantor said. “We bought our house in 2010, but we actually moved here from New York in the spring of 2018.”
There is, perhaps, a slight irony to Cantor’s motivation, given his background as a physician.
“I used to run when I was in New York to try to keep fit, and developed some knee issues when I first moved out here and thought running would not be ideal, but I thought hiking might be a little easier on my knee, although that might be debatable,” Cantor laughed. “So it became my fitness workout to try to go up there a couple of times a week. I was kind of keeping mental note of the number of times I went up there until I got about 10 or so, and I said I ought to start keeping track, just for the fun of it. That’s really all it was.”
By his account, the prescription has been an effective one.
“Like everyone else, I have my aches and pains, but usually I kind of hike through them,” Cantor said. “And the knee actually has gotten better over the years despite my continued activity, which is nice.”
So why Bear Mountain in particular?
“For me, it is my favorite hike,” Cantor said. “It’s pretty difficult, so it gives me a good aerobic workout. It’s pretty close to my home, to be honest, I live in West Sedona, so even when town is busy with spring breakers, I don’t have to go across the ‘Y.’ It’s pretty easy for me to get there. The views are spectacular and the terrain is interesting, challenging and fun. It’s got, for me, every thing I want in a hike. Good distance, good workout since it’s about a 2,000-foot elevation gain.”
“The views are really great the whole way up,” Cantor emphasized. “Sometimes I hike in the Rockies, or other mountain ranges, and you get to the summit and a whole other range of mountains comes into view and it’s really spectacular. I would say the Bear Mountain summit isn’t as much of a ‘wow’ moment, but it is a great view because you can look more to the north and you can see the San Francisco Peaks from the summit, which are nicely snow-covered right now.”
He typically makes the trek by himself these days.
“Friends do occasionally come up with me, but I’ve kind of lost most of them over the last few years, ’cause they don’t want to do Bear Mountain anymore,” Cantor chuckled. “I also kind of do it fast, which I think maybe makes some people shy away from wanting to join me on the hike, although I’m happy to go at anyone’s speed.”
The day he made his 500th ascent, however, his friends were there waiting for him.
“No one was willing to go up there with me, but I was pleasantly surprised at the bottom by a handful of good friends of mine, and we had a little libation and then went out for dinner someplace,” Cantor reminisced. “It was nice to have a little greeting party at the trailhead when I was done … As a gift, a very good friend of mine had a Bear Mountain trailhead sign made for me, and it looks just like the trail signs that are all around Sedona.”
Rather than stopping at a nice round number, Cantor is going right on climbing and had reached 504 Bear Mountain treks as of March 31.
“Almost everybody is smiling, especially on the way down,” Cantor said of the Bear Mountain route. “It’s a good time.”
