What is Cave Springs Campground?
By the time SR 89A reaches Cave Springs the red rock has given way to the pale canyon walls of the upper creek and the sycamores to ponderosa pines, and the air at 5,402 feet is ten degrees cooler than Sedona. Cave Springs is the canyon’s big campground: 84 sites (one of them tent-only) laid out in loops through the pines, a good number of them on the bank of Oak Creek, each with a table, fire ring and grill. It sits about 13 miles north of Sedona and 14 south of Flagstaff, and it is the only Forest Service campground in the canyon with showers, token-operated and temperamental, which for a family on night three is worth the drive by itself.
The creek here is narrower and colder than at Slide Rock, stocked with trout, with pools deep enough to swim in late spring and early summer. A path follows the bank, and the canyon slopes above have a few short trails to viewpoints. The real hikes are down the road: West Fork is 3 miles south, the canyon’s best walk, and its lot fills by 9:30, which is one more argument for sleeping up here.
What you get is a shaded, organized, family campground with water, vault toilets, a host selling $10 firewood and $5 ice, and room for RVs and trailers to 36 feet. What you do not get is a hookup, quiet from the highway, or a site in July unless you booked it in January. The season runs roughly mid-April through October.
How to camp Cave Springs right
Reserve at the six-month mark. Most sites are on recreation.gov six months ahead, and every Friday and Saturday from Memorial Day to Labor Day goes the morning the window opens. A handful are first come, first served, and the host, not the phone line, knows what is open. Weeknights and shoulder months are much easier, and cancellations open up in the last two weeks. It is still a far easier get than Manzanita, the small year-round campground 7 miles south.
Pay like this. $30 a night for up to 8 people and one vehicle, $10 per extra vehicle. Senior and Access passes take half off; other interagency passes are not accepted. Stay limit 7 days, and you must occupy the site the first night. Check-in is 2 p.m., check-out 11 a.m., quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, north about 80 miles to exit 298, SR 179 15 miles to the Sedona Y, then SR 89A north about 13 miles up Oak Creek Canyon. Cave Springs is on the left (west) a mile before Pine Flat, well signed. Roughly 2 hours 25 minutes from Old Town; the canyon road is two lanes and slow behind anyone nervous about the curves. From Flagstaff it is 14 miles south, and if you are coming from the north that way is faster. Each site holds one vehicle plus a trailer, and there is no overflow parking, so a second car pays $10 and needs to fit in the site.
Pick the site and the season. The creekside sites on the outer loop are the ones to fight for; the interior sites are shadier but you hear the highway and the neighbors instead of the water. The exact opening and closing dates shift year to year and are posted on recreation.gov. Late May, early June and October are the best weeks, and a weekday in October, with fall color coming in and half-empty loops, is the best night of the year.
Water, toilets, showers. Potable water, vault toilets, and the coin or token showers, the only ones at any Forest Service campground in the canyon. Ask the host about tokens at check-in and bring quarters anyway.
Fire. Oak Creek Canyon spends most of May and June under Stage 1 or Stage 2 fire restrictions. Call the hotline at 928-226-4607 before you count on a campfire, and buy firewood here rather than hauling it up from the Valley.
Swim and fish. Many sites back onto the creek. Swimming is better in late May and June than in August, when the creek drops. Walk the creek path downstream in the evening for the trout.
Dogs and rules. Leashed or restrained at all times, no horses or pack animals, no amplified music, generators off during quiet hours.
Skip it if you want solitude; this is a busy family campground with the highway through the trees. For that, the Rim above the canyon is the answer, not the canyon, and the day-trips guide has Sedona options that do not need a tent.
A homestead spring in a fault-line canyon
Oak Creek Canyon is a fault before it is a creek. The Oak Creek Fault runs about 30 miles north to south, and movement along it left the west rim some 700 feet higher than the east; the creek did the carving, cutting a canyon 800 to 2,000 feet deep through Coconino Sandstone and the red Schnebly Hill beds below the Mogollon Rim. The springs that give Cave Springs its name come out of that rock where the canyon narrows and the pines take over.
The first people to use the canyon were Sinagua farmers, whose small cliff dwellings survive in the side canyons. After them, the Yavapai and the Dilzhe’e (Tonto) Apache ranged from the Verde Valley up the creek to the rim, hunting and gathering through the seasons. In 1875 the Army marched the Verde Valley’s Yavapai and Apache to the San Carlos reservation, and the canyon opened to homesteaders almost at once. Jim Thompson settled at Indian Gardens in 1876, the first permanent white settler in the Sedona area, and families like the Purtymuns spread up the creek, clearing orchards on every flat and cutting trails to the rim.
Cave Springs was one of those claims. By the Arizona Daily Sun’s account, it was first homesteaded by Oliver Pain Harding, a Civil War veteran and stonemason who came to Flagstaff in 1884 and did stonework on downtown buildings there before moving down into the upper canyon. The Purtymun family later kept a kitchen at the springs, which the Sedona Heritage Museum still includes on its canyon history tour. When the Forest Service turned the spring flat into the campground is not something this guide could pin down from the records available; it is the kind of date the Red Rock Ranger District’s own files would hold.
What made the canyon a place to camp was the road. Coconino National Forest was created in 1908, and the canyon was stitched together from private tracks into a through road: in 1914 a small bridge at Slide Rock completed the first route all the way from Sedona to Flagstaff, crossing the creek again and again. The county took it over in the 1920s, it became State Route 79, and by 1938 it was paved end to end, with the switchbacks climbing out at the north end. Once the canyon was a paved summer escape two hours from Phoenix, the Forest Service lined it with campgrounds, and Cave Springs became the big one.
The canyon’s modern history is fire. On May 20, 2014, the human-caused Slide Fire started just north of Slide Rock State Park. Cave Springs, Pine Flat, West Fork and the other upper-canyon sites were evacuated, the highway closed, and the fire burned 21,227 acres of the west side before it was contained on June 4, the worst in Coconino National Forest history to that point. No buildings burned, but the scorched slopes above the creek have shed debris flows in monsoon storms since, and the Sedona Fire District put nine warning sirens in the canyon. If you hear them tested in summer, that is what they are for.
Why it matters
Cave Springs shows how Arizona’s mountain canyons became the Valley’s summer retreat. A fault made the canyon, a spring made the homestead, a county road made it reachable, and a national forest kept the rest of it public. The same canyon is now a reminder that the pines are a fire landscape, and that one campfire in a dry May can close the whole road. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the most comfortable tent night in Oak Creek: book six months out, take a creekside site on the outer loop, bring quarters for the showers, and walk to West Fork before the day-trippers arrive.