Snoopy Rock
— — the cartoon a mountain decided to be.
Not only on a wall.
“A sandstone fin in the red rocks east of town, shaped — if you look once — exactly like Snoopy lying on his doghouse. Long ears, round nose, the paws folded. The locals point it out without ceremony. Most visitors see it from the roundabout at SR 179, or from the back deck at Tlaquepaque, late afternoon, when the rock holds the last of the sun.
Snoopy Rock, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Snoopy Rock sits in the eastern Sedona skyline, a Schnebly Hill sandstone formation on the edge of Coconino National Forest. The viewing line that gives the silhouette its cartoon shape runs roughly west to east, so the rock reads clearly from uptown Sedona, the SR 179 roundabout, and Tlaquepaque Arts Village. Sedona itself sits at about 4,350 feet, ringed by the red-rock buttes that drew filmmakers from the 1920s on. The formation has no marked trailhead of its own; hikers approach via Munds Mountain Wilderness trails behind Mystic Hills.
The red comes from iron oxide staining the Permian-age Schnebly Hill Formation, a sandstone laid down roughly 280 million years ago when this part of Arizona was a coastal dune field. The same beds form Cathedral Rock, Bell Rock, and the long Mogollon Rim escarpment north of town. Snoopy's silhouette is a weathering artifact: softer cross-bedded layers eroded around harder caps, leaving the long ear and the rounded muzzle. The shape holds longest in the slow desert weathering cycle — measured in centuries, not seasons.
Sedona's red rocks read differently every hour. Snoopy reads best from late afternoon through the half hour before sunset, when the western sun rakes across the silhouette and the iron-oxide stain saturates from rust to ember. Mornings flatten the shape; midday bleaches it. Winter low-sun afternoons hold the colour longest, and the rare Sedona snow dust on the ears is the photograph everyone keeps. Photographers on the SR 179 roundabout watch for the ten minutes when the doghouse goes copper and the sky behind goes cobalt.