SEDONA, Ariz. - This extravagantly scenic, high desert outpost is "the only city in the world with 1,500 channels and no TV stations," boasts Jorgen Korsholm, director of the Hub of the New Age Community, a local association of psychics, spiritual healers and other new-age practitioners.

Bell Rock in Sedona, Ariz. (Sedona Chamber of Commerce).

It's also a place where pickup trucks sport "Miracles Happen - Ask the Angels" bumper stickers, and a bartender at the Heartline Cafe confides he moved here, sight unseen, on the basis of a recurring dream.

Where real estate agents are conversant in the ancient Chinese art of feng shui, and extraterrestrial aficionados quaff "mothership margaritas" at the Red Planet Diner.

And where a significant chunk of the 4 million tourists who explore the area's cinnamon-hued rocks each year come away with more than suntans and sore knees.

Once famous chiefly as a pit stop on the drive to the Grand Canyon, 100 miles to the north, Sedona has become a magnet for mystics and other mind-body travelers. And it's emblematic of a growing trend toward vacations that explore the psyche as well as physical terrain.

"The practical explanation is that baby boomers have reached the age where we've accumulated all the things we possibly could, and we're still not fulfilled. We're looking for the meaning in life, and that extends to our vacations," says Robert Scheer, the 51-year-old editor of Power Trips, a new travel magazine devoted to "sacred places where you can communicate with the spirit of Mother Earth."

More than 5,000 new-agers gathered in Sedona for a 1987 mass ceremony dubbed the Harmonic Convergence, and the town has been catering to like-minded vacationers ever since. In a chamber of commerce visitor study commissioned two years ago, 64% of respondents said they were seeking "some kind of spiritual experience" during their trip.

To be sure, the vast majority of gift shops and art galleries that clog Sedona and nearby Oak Creek attract tourists anchored firmly in the physical dimension.

But Sedona's pilgrims can photograph and cleanse their auras, browse for quartz crystals and Tibetan bowls, and choose among several jeep tours of area vortexes - power spots that ancient Native Americans consider sacred, and modern believers say emit an energy from deep within the earth.

"My intuition is heightened here. It clears the cobwebs of the past, and I feel at home in my soul," says Sheilaa Hite, a Malibu, Calif.-based psychic who recently shepherded seven of her clients on a tour of the area. On their agenda: savoring the sunset from a vortex called Airport Mesa, and joining a medicine wheel ceremony led by a local shaman.

"People are choosing vacations that offer more than a change of scenery and connect them to what's inside as well as outside," says Ila Sarley of the 20-year-old Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., a holistic center that sponsors workshops in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bali and Utah's Canyonlands. The center expanded its season last year and now offers more than 325 programs.

As Sedona-based anthropologist and photographer Martin Gray points out, travel to sacred sites is nothing new. But the reasons for making those pilgrimages have changed.

Rather than journey out of religious tradition or for a specific therapeutic purpose, a growing crop of small, metaphysically attuned tour companies "are selling a transformation of consciousness," says Gray, who's spent the past 12 years exploring more than 800 sacred sites around the globe.

Many of their most popular destinations - England's Stonehenge, Egypt's Great Pyramids and Peru's Machu Picchu among them - can claim a spiritual history that dates back thousands of years.

But other trips rely less on the sacred qualities of a location than on the participants' intentions. Case in point: New Age Journal magazine's first "Inner Voyage," a January cruise that combines Caribbean sun, vegetarian cuisine and advice from 25 "leading pioneers of human consciousness."

No matter what the setting, companies say they're attracting a new breed of customer who wouldn't have considered such a trip a few years ago.

"It's always been a niche market, but that niche is getting broader," says Toby Weiss, president of 19-year-old Power Places Tours in Dana Point, Calif. "This may be old hat in Los Angeles, but there's been a swell of interest in the Midwest over the past five years."

"When we started 10 years ago, if you mentioned you were going to a spa to practice yoga, people thought you were joining a cult," adds Sheryl Sciro of Spa-Finders, a travel service that represents destination, resort and day spas worldwide.

Today, says Sciro, about two-thirds of the USA's mainstream destination spas are promoting such metaphysical treatments as meditation and reflexology.

Sedona's Enchantment Resort is one of them. Tucked deep into Boynton Canyon, one of the area's best-known vortexes, the one-time tennis retreat now reaches out to guests who want more than a body wrap and tips on how to improve their serves. A Havasupai native named Uqualla serves as the resort's "Native American ambassador" while Enchantment's spa just added "An Awakening" - a 90-minute, $150 massage that encompasses crystals and alchemy oils mixed at sacred sites around the world.

"We walk a fine line," admits Enchantment's activities director, Richard Hill. "You don't want to scare off Joe, the M.D. from Detroit. But you've also got Zeke, the guy from L.A. who comes to look for vortexes."

These days, points out Frank Miller of Sedona-Oak Creek Canyon Chamber of Commerce, Zeke from L.A. is almost as likely to be joined by a family from Iowa City. The chamber hands out free vortex maps to anyone who asks - including, Miller recalls, a woman wondering whether her husband's pacemaker would be affected by the vortexes' electrical charges.

Trance medium San Dan Yi (USAT).

Not all the seekers who wind up at vortexes such as Bell Rock and Airport Mesa tap into Sedona's psychic energy: "When I go to Bell Rock, all I feel is gas," jokes San Dan Yi, a local trance medium.

But "when you come down to it, the beauty of the red rocks is the common denominator here," says Marty Wolf, owner of Earth Wisdom Tours in Sedona. "Whether or not you believe in a vortex, the land leads you to a still mind and an open heart."

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY