Cathedral Rock or Devil's Bridge: Which Sedona Hike First

Cathedral Rock Trail No. 170 is 1.1 miles round trip with 669 feet of elevation gain, which the Coconino National Forest itself rates Strenuous and describes as more of a rock scramble than a hike over exposed rock. The math explains why the rating sits where it does: two-thirds of a Devil's Bridge-length gain squeezed into roughly a fifth of the distance. The Forest Service's own routing puts the round trip at about an hour and a half.

The trail climbs through juniper and manzanita for the first few minutes, then turns onto open slickrock and stays there. The defining stretch is a chute near the top where hikers use hands as well as feet to work up a series of rock steps; there is no exposed drop that requires technical gear, but wet or icy rock turns this section genuinely hazardous, and the Forest Service does not publish a closure policy for weather, so a rainy or freshly-snowed morning is a personal judgment call, not a posted rule.

What you get at the top

Cathedral Rock's summit area is a saddle between the formation's twin spires, not the true summit itself, and it opens a wide-angle view across the Village of Oak Creek and Bell Rock that most visitors rate as the best short payoff in Sedona for the effort involved. There is no queue for a single photo spot the way Devil's Bridge has one, because the vantage is broad rather than a single arch, but the small saddle area gets crowded at sunset regardless, when the light on the surrounding rock is the reason most people time their visit for the last hour before dark.

Devil's Bridge Trail No. 120 does not have one length, because it does not have one trailhead, and every comparison that prints a single figure for it is skipping the part that actually decides the hike:

• Dry Creek Road trailhead: 1.6 miles round trip, 371 feet of gain, rated Moderate, but the trailhead itself needs a high-clearance vehicle to reach over the last stretch of unpaved road
• Mescal trailhead: 4.0 miles round trip; the Forest Service does not publish a separate elevation-gain figure for this longer approach
• Dry Creek Vista trailhead via the Chuckwagon connector trail. 5.8 miles round trip; elevation gain is likewise not separately stated

The trade is the road, not the climb

This is the fact most blog comparisons flatten: Devil's Bridge is not one moderate walk versus Cathedral Rock's one strenuous scramble. It is a short, physically easy walk if you can get a high-clearance vehicle to the Dry Creek Road trailhead, or a genuinely long day-hike distance from either of the paved-access trailheads. The elevation gain along any of the three approaches is modest compared to Cathedral Rock's chute, none of it involves hands-and-feet scrambling, but the last few hundred feet up to the bridge itself narrow into a short rocky climb regardless of which trailhead you started from.

Cathedral Rock Trailhead and both of Devil's Bridge's paved-access trailheads, Dry Creek and Mescal, all sit on the Coconino National Forest's standard Red Rock Pass fee-site list, so a $5 daily pass, $15 weekly pass or America the Beautiful annual pass is required to park at any of them. None of these lots is large, and no Forest Service page publishes how many vehicles any of them actually hold. That capacity number simply does not exist as a published fact, which is itself worth knowing before you plan a mid-morning arrival and assume you will find a spot.

The shuttle covers one, not the other

The free Sedona Shuttle runs to Dry Creek Vista and Mescal, both of which serve Devil's Bridge, Thursday through Sunday, 7:00 am to 5:30 pm, with a 15 to 45 minute wait between pickups and no reservation needed. Cathedral Rock has no shuttle stop at all, so a full lot there means driving on to try again, waiting it out, or coming back at a different hour. There is no fallback route to the trailhead the way there is for Devil's Bridge riders.

Whether the shuttle-served lots are physically closed to private cars while the shuttle runs is not confirmed by any Forest Service or City of Sedona page; what is published is the shuttle's own schedule and that the lots are small, and that is as far as the facts go.

The order that works: take Devil's Bridge first, using the free Sedona Shuttle from the Dry Creek Vista or Mescal park-and-ride if you are visiting Thursday to Sunday, or the Mescal trailhead directly on your own car on the other three days to avoid the high-clearance Dry Creek Road. Aim for the shuttle's first run or an arrival at Mescal by 8am; the queue for the arch photo is shortest in the first hour the trail is open and lengthens through the late morning as tour groups and day visitors arrive.

Cathedral Rock works better as an afternoon or evening stop precisely because its lot, while small, tends to turn over faster than Devil's Bridge's. Most Cathedral Rock visits run under two hours including the drive, parking search and hike, so a mid-afternoon arrival with a plan to leave by sunset is workable. Bring the Red Rock Pass bought that morning; it is valid at every standard Forest Service fee site in the Sedona area for the day, so one $5 pass covers both trailheads.