Rock Designs Pose Pesky Problem for Rangers in New-Age Haven

Brushing aside pine branches, Bill Stafford ambles down a dirt trail to a clearing beneath one of the red-rock formations that provide a stunning backdrop to this trendy arts village.

Here in Boynton Canyon, the U.S. Forest Service ranger finds his longtime nemesis: a curious collection of rocks ranging in size from a fist to a football arranged in a circle big enough to hold a Cadillac.

A quarter, a dime, a penny, a half-dozen crystals, tiny seashells, a pair of jade-like gems and a 6-inch piece of driftwood rest on a fat chunk of limestone in the center. As medicine wheels go, this one is above average.

“These are more crystals than I’ve ever seen at one of these,” said Stafford, whose job for the last decade has included busting up the man-made rock designs in the Coconino National Forest. “Somebody must have gotten a good deal on them.”

Sedona is a mystical mecca for thousands of New Age adherents who believe intense natural energy emanates from vortexes deep beneath the red rocks. But forest officials complain that those who build medicine wheels are trampling archeological sites and scattering artifacts in their bid for spiritual purification.

So rangers spend a good deal of time searching out and destroying the wheels in the sprawling pinyon and juniper forests around Sedona--about 100 a year, said Stafford, the wilderness and trails staff officer for the Beaver Creek-Sedona Ranger Districts. Scores more go undiscovered.

Medicine wheels are a nuisance not only because they alter the natural beauty of the landscape but because of their risk to unexplored archeological sites, Stafford said.

The Sedona area is home to an unusually high concentration of archeological ruins--about 13 per square mile--only a few of which have been examined by experts.

“If there’s a nice line of rocks that was a wall to an archeological site, and you take it and make a little round medicine wheel, you’ve unknowingly ruined that archeological site,” Stafford said.

Stafford said he’s found cornmeal, photos, money, even human ashes within the medicine wheels, the largest of which was 200 feet in diameter.

“People like to take crystals and bury them so that they regenerate their power, so to speak,” he said.

Although building a medicine wheel on federal lands is technically illegal, no one has been prosecuted, Stafford said.

Medicine wheels have been a part of sacred Plains Indian rituals for centuries. They symbolize the preponderance of the circle in life--for example, the sun, sky, Earth and moon.

They began showing up all over Sedona’s red-orange soil a decade ago when 10,000 New Agers arrived for what was known as the Harmonic Convergence, chanting, humming and meditating to awaken and balance the energies of Earth.

“The medicine wheel is not limited to Native American expression,” said Rahelio, a Sedona astrologer of Indian-Spanish descent who goes by a single name. “The wheel is a universal symbol and as such is a symbol of wholeness and of healing.”

People leave small offerings within the rock boundaries as “their way of giving thanks or honoring or wishing for a blessing in their lives,” he said.

Rahelio, who has a Forest Service permit to lead tours to vortexes on federal land, said he takes tourists to a medicine wheel site on private land.

“Ninety to 95% of the people would never conceive of leaving a medicine wheel in the forest,” said Pete Sanders, who also leads back-country vortex tours. “The other 5% are uneducated or off on the fringe where they feel it’s their religious right to do it.”

He advises his customers to create medicine wheels in their mind and leave the rocks alone.

But Sanders contends medicine wheels do far less damage than careless smoking that ignites forest fires.

“People who put up the medicine wheels are certainly not the enemies or ecoterrorists of the environment,” he said. “They respect it. But when you get lots and lots of people doing these things, there is an impact.”