What is Boynton Canyon Trail?
Boynton Canyon is a box canyon: it goes in and does not come out. From a trailhead at 4,525 feet beside the gate of the Enchantment Resort, Boynton Canyon Trail No. 47 runs 3 miles up the canyon and stops under a wall, for 6 miles round trip and 931 feet of climbing, most of it in the last mile. The Forest Service rates it moderately challenging, mostly for length; the footing is good the whole way.
It has three distinct parts. The first mile skirts the resort’s boundary fence on a bench above its casitas, with the Boynton Vista spur near the start climbing a short saddle to the view that the vortex literature made famous. The middle mile crosses open juniper flats with the walls closing in on both sides. The last mile drops into the canyon’s drainage and climbs through a forest that does not belong this far south, ponderosa, Gambel oak, bigtooth maple, Douglas fir, cool even in May, to a dead end beneath a thousand feet of banded sandstone. Almost everyone who makes it that far has it to themselves.
The reason they have it to themselves is the Subway Cave, about two miles in: an alcove the shape of a train tunnel with Sinagua masonry walls inside, reached by an unofficial side path and a steep slickrock scramble. It is not Forest Service trail and is not signed, it has become the most-shared Sedona photo after Devil’s Bridge, and it has changed the character of what used to be a quiet trail. What you get is the longest shaded hike in the red rocks with real archaeology on it. What you do not get is parking after 8 a.m., a shuttle, water, or any quiet on the first two miles on a weekend.
How to hike it right
Buy the pass before you leave town. A Red Rock Pass ($5 a day, $15 a week, $20 a year) or an America the Beautiful pass on the dash. Buy at the machine or on recreation.gov. Nothing reserves and there is no shuttle to this trailhead.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, north about 80 miles to exit 298, SR 179 15 miles to the Sedona Y, SR 89A west 3 miles to Dry Creek Road, right, then follow the signs for Boynton Canyon: Dry Creek Road to Boynton Pass Road, left, to Boynton Canyon Road, right, which ends at the resort gate with the trailhead lot on the left. All paved, about 2 hours 15 minutes from Old Town. The lot is small, there is no overflow, the resort’s road is private and patrolled, and the Forest Service tickets the shoulder. On cool-season weekends it is full by 8. Arrive by 7:30 or come after 2.
Pick the season. October through April is ideal. The back of the canyon is shaded enough for a morning start into May; in summer this is a first-light hike with the first two miles in the open; in winter the box canyon holds ice for weeks after the rest of Sedona has melted.
Water and toilets. Vault toilet at the trailhead, no water anywhere. Two liters per person in warm weather.
Respect the wilderness line. The trail enters the Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness almost immediately: no bikes, no drones, dogs on leash.
Go to the end. Most of the crowd turns around at the Subway spur. The last mile beyond it, under Douglas fir to the base of the wall, is the best part and nearly empty.
The Subway and the ruins. The spur is an obvious unsigned path to the right about two miles in, ending in a steep friction scramble on slickrock with real exposure near the top; wear shoes with grip, skip it when wet or icy, and do not take sandals, small children or dogs up it. The walls inside are Sinagua, roughly a thousand years old, and federal law protects them. Do not climb on them, touch the plaster, move stones or stack rocks. The same goes for any rock art you find in the canyon.
Dogs. On leash. Shaded and cool in the back half, open and hot in the front from late spring on, and no place on the scramble.
Skip the cave if you want the quiet version of Sedona; go to the end instead and do the Vista spur at sunset on the way out. For the famous arch and an even worse parking problem, Devil’s Bridge is the next canyon over; for shade and a creek, West Fork up Oak Creek is the better walk; for the postcard, Cathedral Rock and the Bell Rock loop are shorter and on the shuttle.
A homeland, a resort fence and a cave the internet found
People painted on the walls of this canyon before anyone built in it. The oldest pictographs in the Boynton country date to about 2000 BCE, left by Archaic hunters, and they were still visible when the Sinagua arrived. Between roughly 1130 and 1280 these farmers, ancestral to the Hopi, built the cliff dwellings of the Boynton and Loy canyon country, among them Honanki, Bear House, with a roof beam that tree-rings date to 1271, and the masonry rooms wedged into the alcove that hikers now call the Subway. Fires and rebuilding show at least three construction phases. By about 1300 the Sinagua had gone, drawn north toward the Hopi mesas, and the canyons emptied.
The Yavapai came next, with the Tonto Apache, and their pictographs date from 1400 to 1875. For the Yavapai the Verde Valley is not a place they moved to but the place they began: their origin story has the people emerge from the earth at what is now Montezuma Well, and the red rock canyons around Sedona are inside that homeland. That ended in March 1875, when the Army closed the Camp Verde reservation, whose irrigated farms had begun to feed its people, after contractors supplying the reservations complained, and marched its residents 180 miles to San Carlos in winter. More than 100 Yavapai died on the way. By 1900 most of the survivors had walked back to the Verde, and in 1910 the government set aside 40 acres at Camp Verde for them, the seed of today’s Yavapai-Apache Nation.
Anglo settlement followed the removal. J. J. Thompson homesteaded Oak Creek Canyon in 1876, the Sedona post office opened in 1902 with 55 residents, and the Boynton name settled on the canyon during the ranching years; who Boynton was, the Forest Service does not say. Archaeology arrived before tourists: Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian dug at Honanki in 1895 and 1911 while tracing Hopi migration traditions, and named it. Sedona itself stayed a ranching and film-location village, more than sixty Hollywood productions between 1923 and the 1970s, until the 1950s brought vacation homes and retirees.
Two things happened to Boynton Canyon in the 1980s, and they pull against each other to this day. In 1984 Congress created the Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness, taking in the canyon above the trailhead, so that everything past the first few hundred yards is protected from roads, bikes and development. And on the private land at the canyon’s mouth a developer built Enchantment Resort, whose casitas, gatehouse and boundary fence define the first mile of the hike and whose road is the reason the trailhead lot is so small. Sedona incorporated in 1988, a year after José Argüelles’s Harmonic Convergence gathering of 1987 put the town’s “vortex” sites on the map, Boynton Vista among the four, which is why the saddle at the start of the trail is a place of meditation as much as a viewpoint.
The last change was the fastest. Through the 2000s Boynton was the long, quiet alternative to Devil’s Bridge. Then the Subway alcove, which had sat on no map and no sign for a century, started appearing in photographs, and by the late 2010s the spur to it was a worn path and the lot was full by 8. The Forest Service has never built or signed the route, and it has not closed it either; the ruins inside are protected under federal law, and their survival now depends on the people who climb up to them. The forest at the end of the canyon, meanwhile, is as empty as it was in 1984.
Why it matters
Boynton Canyon holds the whole Sedona story in three miles: a Sinagua village, a Yavapai homeland taken by force, a resort on the private land and a wilderness on the public, and an archaeological site that social media turned into a destination before anyone decided whether it should be. It is the place to understand why Sedona’s trails are crowded at the mouth and empty at the end, and why the red rocks are both a sacred landscape and a parking problem. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is clear: it is the best half-day hike in Sedona if you start early and walk to the wall, and a frustrating one if you arrive at nine and stop at the cave.