I’ve known the bright, sunny Cindy Morrow for many years, but I never realized what a pivotal role she played in Sedona’s early mountain biking days until we walked the Bottom Up trail together on a warm spring afternoon. We talked as we went, pausing here and there in the quiet wash and beneath towering boulders, savoring a trail that felt entirely ours for a few unhurried hours. It was, without question, the easiest interview I’ve done in this series. Cindy’s easygoing nature and gift for storytelling made it feel less like an interview and more like a shared memory unfolding in real time.
Cindy began by telling me she didn’t plan to land in Sedona, but the place pulled her in anyway and never let go. She arrived in 1988 with a bike rack on her car, unaware she would become a quiet witness to a turning point—when Sedona’s landscape began shifting from loosely rambling wilderness to a sought-after recreation destination. Back then, the canyons already belonged to hikers, but mountain biking was still more rumor than reality. There were no trail maps, no organized advocacy, no defined “bike culture.” Just a handful of curious riders, wide-open terrain, and the sense that something was beginning.
“My car broke down, and I didn’t have any money,” she says. “I started working for Doris at Food Among the Flowers. She didn’t pay me anything—because that was Doris—but I made tips. That’s how I met Rama.”
Rama was the bearded visionary who would go on to open Sedona’s first mountain bike shop, Mountain Bike Heaven. Cindy had come west with a new mountain bike strapped to her car, an old road bike, and almost no money. One day at Food Among the Flowers, a station wagon pulled in carrying two bikes—one road, one mountain— the same color as Cindy’s. The man behind the wheel was Rama, a former health food store owner from Ohio. He started working in the kitchen, and before long, the two were riding together almost every day.
“That was the beginning of things. I was looking for places to ride. I was looking for somebody to ride with. We were the first,” she says. “There was nobody to get any information from. All the trails that were built went into wilderness, where you weren’t allowed to ride. We just started exploring.”
At the time, “exploring” often meant bushwhacking.
Back then, the area felt dramatically different from what Sedona would later become. Trails were informal, shaped by locals who knew where to slip off the main paths and disappear into the backcountry. The Forest Service maintained a light presence, aside from designated wilderness areas where bikes were strictly prohibited. You could walk out Sedona’s back door, pitch a tent just beyond town, and spend the night without a permit. That freedom shaped how Cindy and her circle approached riding—they navigated by instinct and experience, not by maps or guidebooks.
Cindy’s early days in Sedona were rooted in a deep sense of self-reliance. Long before she ever got on a mountain bike, she had spent time backpacking the Superstitions and trekking through the Grand Canyon—experiences that taught her how to read the land and trust her own sense of direction.
To her, Sedona felt at first almost too crowded—until you realized how far you could go without seeing another person. Trails that now carry official names were, back then, just faint lines connecting obvious landmarks. Sugarloaf, Chimney Rock, and the surrounding terrain were simple out-and-back wanderings, shaped by locals who never thought to name them.
Cindy was there at the birth of Sedona’s first mountain bike shop. “At a certain point, Rama decided—because he had been in business—that he wanted to open something of his own in Sedona,” she recalls. “So he went to bike mechanic school in Oregon, in Ashland, I think, and became a mechanic. When he came back, I remember us lying in bed, talking about his experience—how much he loved it, how excited he was. I remember him saying it was ‘mountain bike heaven,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that’s the name.’”
She laughs at the memory.
“Now, when I mentioned that to him years later, he said, ‘No, no, no—I came up with the name myself!’ But that’s how I remember it.”
Cindy didn’t limit her explorations to mountain biking. She shared one memorabloe adventure.. “You know, Sycamore is outside the Sedona area, but it’s still red rock country—Sycamore Pass and all that. Back then, Sycamore Pass was hardly used at all, and I’d go out there backpacking.”
She pauses, then adds with a laugh, “At the time, I often backpacked naked. I hiked naked, too. That’s what I’d done in the Superstitions, and there was never anyone out there.”
One trip, though, didn’t go quite as expected.
“This time I ran into somebody, which was… a little embarrassing,” she says. “He probably meant me no harm, but I suddenly found myself making up stories—‘Oh yeah, the people I’m camping with are just right down there’—just in case.” She grins. “And he just looked at me like ‘Oookay…’”
As we walked, the conversation gradually shifted from those early, freewheeling days to how the forest is managed now—a contrast Cindy has watched unfold in real time.
“It’s two very different mindsets,” she says. “You have those of us who live in Sedona and value the wildness of it. And then you have the Forest Service, who feel the pressure of more and more people coming in and believe they need to protect it.”
But, as she points out, there’s a third force in the mix.
“Then you also have people who want to make money off it—guides, Jeep tour companies. Over time, a lot of management was turned over to Recreation Resource Management. They run places like West Fork and Red Rock Crossing, and that’s a separate private entity.”
To Cindy, that shift represents something deeper than just fees or oversight.
“It was part of a push to privatize trails that were meant to be public—meant to always, always be free,” she says. “That was being affirmed in Congress back in the ’60s. So it wasn’t just about people not wanting to pay—it felt like an imposition, a misuse.”
She pauses, then adds with a hint of irony, “And there’s this contradiction—‘We don’t want you building trails,' but at the same time, trails are being built everywhere.”
“We’re going to take your little secret trails—the ones you don’t tell anybody about, the ones you go to so you can be alone—and every time we find one, we’re going to engineer it into a trail this wide.”
She lets that sit for a moment.
“So it becomes this question of—who’s on the right side here?” she says. “Now you have trails where there didn’t used to be trails. You’ve got easier access into sensitive archaeological areas and places that were once harder to reach.”
At the same time, she understands the reasoning behind it.
“The rationale was that if people go off-trail, others will follow those paths, get lost, and end up causing more damage,” she explains. “So it created this real dichotomy—between those of us who wanted to keep things as wild as possible, where you had to truly know your way around, and the idea that maybe there should just be a few designated, well-maintained trails for visitors.”
She pauses.
“Instead of all of them becoming that.”
Cindy recalls early meetings with the Forest Service, where the direction of management was already beginning to take shape.
“One of the things we noticed was that there was a faction focused on attracting federal funding,” she says. “If they started charging fees, if they turned areas over to Recreation Resource Management, there were ways to bring in more money.”
That tension—between preservation, access, and economics—would go on to reshape how people experience Sedona’s trails today.
I shift the conversation forward.
That was the late ’80s. Now, nearly four decades later, after all the growth and all the changes, I ask her a simple question: Did we lose something?
Cindy takes a moment before answering.
“I don’t know,” she says. “In a way, maybe we won.”
She smiles slightly, as if weighing the contradiction.
“What happens now—and I tell people this all the time when I’m out guiding tours (something she does to this day) there are maybe ten or twelve trailheads that everybody goes to. That’s where the crowds are.”
Her advice is simple.
“Look on Facebook, or pick up a hiking book—and then don’t go to those places."
At 70, Cindy is still out there hiking, biking, and leading tours in her trademark mini skirt, sharing her knowledge, great stories, and deep love of Sedona with anyone who leans in a little closer. Cindy Morrow was one of Red Rock’s first mountain biking adventurers and Sedona’s first Super Girl.