When you arrive to Sedona, you are met with views that put you in such awe. I am always put in awe the first sight of red rock, and then you are suddenly surrounded completely by it. We followed the printed papers and accidentally parked at the Fay Canyon parking lot. We knew something was wrong due to there being no Red Rock Pass vending machine. We decided to hit the road again and found the parking lot for Bear Mountain. The parking lot only had three other cars, but I guess that is what you should expect when you arrive at 530am. We wanted to beat not only the heat, but also the crowds. We crossed the road and started our adventure. It was sunny and 54 degrees. Coming from Phoenix, this was an absolutely beautiful morning. You could hear the birds, and the lizards were running across the trail like crazy. The most annoying part of the hike was the flies and flying beetles that would attack your face. A bee followed us for quite some time and kept landing on us, but that was the least of our annoyances. As we kept hiking, we encountered older gentleman going down as we were going up. He told us it would get easier from the point we were at. I think he could tell on our faces we were thinking “we are out of our minds!”. The path is clearly marked with white painted diamonds the whole way up (We even found a ranger painting them as we were heading down! Thank you for your hard work! He even asked us if we had any troubles because some diamonds/arrows were faded. We did not!). We were warned about fake summits. These fake summits were absolutely beautiful and give you an amazing view of all the mountains in the distance as well as the red rock. You never truly get how high you are climbing until you keep seeing things get smaller and smaller. Then you are thinking to yourself “Wow, we look higher than that mountain” as you look into the distance. You never realize you are truly done until you are staring at the sign that tells you “End of Trail”. I was extremely excited to see this sign. We decided to take a snack break and snap some pictures while we were at the top. We only encountered about 3 people going up. It took us about two and half hours to get to the top. We had to keep taking breaks due to leg pains from the steepness. It felt so good to be at the top! We decided to descend to beat the heat because it started to warm up rather quickly. It took about an hour and a half to get down. We passed about 15 people as they were making their trek going up. All in all, I felt incredibly proud after hiking Bear Mountain. It gives gorgeous scenic views, and really does make yourself work for it!