What is the Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte Loop?
Drive north on SR 179 out of the Village of Oak Creek and the first thing that stands up out of the juniper is a bell: Bell Rock, a near-perfect cone of banded red sandstone topping out at 4,919 feet, with the longer, flat-topped mass of Courthouse Butte behind it. The Courthouse Butte Loop, Trail No. 135, circles both. It is 3.8 miles around with about 300 feet of elevation change, on a mix of wide, hard-packed red dirt and slickrock, and the Forest Service rates it moderate mainly for the sun and a couple of rocky stretches near Bell Rock. For anyone who hikes Scottsdale’s preserve, it is a flat, easy morning with better rock.
The spine of the whole area is the Bell Rock Pathway, No. 96, a broad trail that parallels the highway for 3.5 miles from the Village of Oak Creek to the Little Horse area and is the local bike commute as much as a hike. The loop leaves it about half a mile from either trailhead, swings east around Courthouse Butte into a corner of the Munds Mountain Wilderness, and comes back along the open west side of Bell Rock, where every other person has left the trail to scramble up the benches. There is no official route to Bell Rock’s top. The lower benches are an easy, satisfying scramble; the upper slabs are where the Sedona Fire District spends its weekends.
It is not a wilderness experience; traffic hums on 179 and the helicopters pass. It is simply the most accessible red rock in Arizona, and the right first hike. What you get is two paved lots with toilets, a $5 pass and a loop anyone can finish. What you do not get is shade, water, quiet or a summit.
How to hike it right
Pay the pass. A Red Rock Pass ($5 a day, $15 a week, $20 a year) or an America the Beautiful pass goes on the dash. Buy it at the machine in either lot, at the Red Rock Ranger Visitor Center a mile south on SR 179, or on recreation.gov. Both lots are paved, with accessible vault toilets and an information kiosk, and both fill by 9 or 10 on cool-season weekends. The Sedona Shuttle’s parking closures do not apply here.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, north about 80 miles to exit 298, then SR 179 north. Bell Rock Vista is 8.3 miles from the freeway on the right (milepost 307.1), just past the Village of Oak Creek; Courthouse Vista is 1.1 miles farther on the right at milepost 308.2, via a signed left-turn lane across the northbound traffic. About 1 hour 45 minutes from Old Town, the shortest drive to any Sedona trailhead, and all pavement. This is the easy half of a Sedona day trip.
Pick the season and the hour. Perfect October through April. From May through September, start at sunrise and be off the rock by 9 or 10, per the summer rules; the loop is almost entirely unshaded at 4,300 feet. Bare sandstone is slick after rain and for a few hours after a winter snow. Sunrise is the best cheap show in Sedona in any month: the lot is empty and the buttes go from gray to orange in ten minutes.
Water. None at either trailhead. Carry a liter per person in cool weather, two in warm. The loop has about four trees’ worth of shade.
Walk it counterclockwise from Courthouse Vista. You get the shady east side of Courthouse Butte in the morning and come back along the open west face of Bell Rock when the light is on it. The wilderness boundary on the east side is where the bikes disappear and the trail gets quieter.
Scramble with a plan. Half a mile in, where the loop leaves the Pathway, almost everyone peels off to climb Bell Rock. Go up as far as the first big bench and no farther unless you are sure of your way down: downclimbing sandstone is harder than going up, and most rescues here are people who went up a slab they cannot reverse. See scramble and class ratings if the words mean nothing to you yet.
Bikes, horses, dogs. Bikes are fine on the Pathway and the Llama and Big Park connectors and prohibited by law in the wilderness half of the loop. The Forest Service’s pages disagree on horses on the Pathway; there is trailer parking at the vista lots, so ask the ranger station. Dogs on leash, and only at dawn in the warm months; the slickrock burns pads by late morning.
Skip it if you want solitude or a climb. Cathedral Rock, three miles up the road, is about ten times harder per mile and needs the shuttle on busy days. Boynton Canyon and Devil’s Bridge are the longer, shadier walks; Red Rock State Park is the version with a creek and a visitor center.
The bell at the gate
The rock is Permian. Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte are horizontally bedded sandstone of the Supai Formation, laid down as river and dune deposits roughly a quarter of a billion years ago and carved into their present shapes as Oak Creek and its side washes cut down through the plateau edge. The first people to farm beneath them were the Sinagua, who occupied the Verde Valley and the red rock country from about 500 to 1425, leaving the cliff dwellings at Palatki and Honanki a few miles west and the pueblo at Tuzigoot downstream. When they left in the early 1400s the country passed to the Yavapai and the Tonto Apache, who held it until the Army’s campaigns of the 1870s.
Anglo settlement came late and small. John J. Thompson took up land in Oak Creek Canyon in 1876; the Sedona post office opened in 1902 with 55 residents, named for the postmaster’s wife because her mother thought the word sounded pretty. On July 2, 1908, the land around Bell Rock became part of the new Coconino National Forest, created from the San Francisco Mountains reserve of 1898, and it has been Forest Service ground ever since. For the next half century the buttes stood over open range and a dirt road; the grassland south of them that pioneers called Big Park was cattle country until the early 1960s, when it was subdivided as the Village of Oak Creek, and by 1960 the state had fixed the present line of SR 179 past Bell Rock’s base.
Two decisions in the 1980s made the loop what it is. In 1984 Congress designated the 18,150-acre Munds Mountain Wilderness, whose western boundary wraps the east side of Courthouse Butte; that line is why mountain bikes leave the loop there and why the back half is quieter than the front. And on August 16 and 17, 1987, José Argüelles’s Harmonic Convergence, a planetary meditation timed to his reading of the Aztec calendar, brought thousands of people to Sedona’s self-declared vortex sites, Bell Rock chief among them. Sedona incorporated the next year, in 1988. The New Age trade that still fills the Bell Rock lots with people holding crystals dates from that weekend, and the Forest Service’s Red Rock Pass, the parking fee that pays for the toilets and the trail crews, is its administrative descendant.
The last reshaping was the road. In 2006 the U.S. Department of Transportation named SR 179 an All-American Road, the highest tier of the National Scenic Byways program, and the state rebuilt it with roundabouts, a lower design speed and the paved vista lots at mileposts 307.1 and 308.2 that you park in today. The Village of Oak Creek became a designated Dark Sky Community by 2016, which is why the sunrise here starts with stars. What is coming is more of the same: more visitors, a shuttle system that has so far left these lots alone, and a Forest Service that manages the loop as a front-country trail rather than a wilderness one.
Why it matters
Bell Rock is Sedona’s front door, and the loop around it is the clearest short lesson in what red rock country is: Permian sandstone, Sinagua farmland, Yavapai range, Forest Service land, subdivision gateway and New Age shrine, all in 3.8 miles you can walk in two hours. It also shows how Arizona pays for its scenery now, with a $5 pass at a machine instead of a ranger at a gate. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: this is the hike to do first, at sunrise, from Courthouse Vista, with a liter of water and no intention of reaching the top of anything. Everything harder in Sedona makes more sense once you have walked around the bell.