Things to Do in Sedona

The Red Rock Pass is a Forest Service PARKING pass, not a town entry fee: it covers trailheads like Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock, Boynton Canyon and Doe Mountain at $5 a day, $15 a week or $20 a year, or an America the Beautiful Interagency Pass in place of it. It does not cover driving through Sedona, parking in Uptown, or either state park. Slide Rock and Red Rock State Park are Arizona State Parks with their own per-vehicle fee instead, and the Red Rock Pass is not accepted at either. West Fork Trail's Call of the Canyon site is a third system again: a concessionaire day-use fee, $15 a vehicle, that neither the Red Rock Pass nor the America the Beautiful pass covers.

And the free shuttle reaches five trailheads, Cathedral Rock, Little Horse, Soldier Pass, Dry Creek Vista and Mescal, Thursday to Sunday 7:00 am to 5:30 pm, with no reservation and no fee at all. Whether those five trailheads' own car lots are physically closed to private vehicles while the shuttle runs is not stated on the shuttle's own page; what is confirmed is that the lots are small and fill early regardless.

Eight of the twenty cost nothing at all: the Chapel of the Holy Cross, Tlaquepaque, the Amitabha Stupa, the drive through Oak Creek Canyon, and Montezuma Well next to Montezuma Castle. Bell Rock Pathway and every other Forest Service trail on this list technically charges for the parking, not the trail itself; you can walk in for free if someone else drops you at the trailhead or you arrive on foot or by bike. A longer breakdown of exactly which fee applies where is on free things to do in Sedona.

For a no-cost morning, the Chapel, the Stupa and a short stretch of Bell Rock Pathway fit before lunch without a single ticket or pass, if you skip the trailheads that need one.

Red Rock State Park and Montezuma Castle are the two easiest stops for a family: both are paved, both are short, and both allow strollers on the main path. Under-13s go free at the Sedona Heritage Museum and under-16s go free at Tuzigoot and Montezuma Castle; children under 7 go free at Red Rock State Park and youth 7 to 13 pay $5 there. Slide Rock's natural waterslide is the obvious kid magnet on this list, but its small lot fills by mid-morning in summer, so arriving at the 8:00 am opening matters more with children in the car than with any other stop here.

Palatki's 14-person tour slots and unpaved forest-road drive make it the hardest stop on this list for a stroller or a very young child; save it for an older group. A tighter, family-specific version of this page with kid-rated trails is on Sedona with kids.

Grand Canyon, Antelope Canyon, Jerome and Flagstaff are real Sedona day trips, but they sit far enough outside town that pinning them to this map would break its scale, and each has fee and reservation rules of its own: Antelope Canyon requires a Navajo-authorised guided tour and sits on Navajo Nation land, which observes daylight saving while Sedona and the rest of Arizona do not. Jerome and Flagstaff, and every other trip past the Verde Valley, are on day trips from Sedona with their own drive times and fees rather than folded into this page.