What is Devil’s Bridge?
Devil’s Bridge is a slab of red sandstone that erosion hollowed out from beneath, leaving a natural arch about 50 feet high with a flat top wide enough to walk across. It is the largest arch in the Sedona area and the most photographed thing in red rock country: one person mid-span, shot by a friend from the ledge opposite. On a winter Saturday there is a polite line for that ledge.
The official Devil’s Bridge Trail No. 120 is short, 1.6 miles round trip with 371 feet of climbing from a trailhead at 4,605 feet, through manzanita and juniper on an old road grade that the Forest Service says was originally built for jeeps, then up a steep natural staircase of stone steps to the top. The Forest Service rates it moderate. The trouble is the trailhead, which sits 1.3 miles up the unpaved half of Dry Creek Road, FR 152, a rutted red-dirt jeep track that needs high clearance and should not be driven wet. Pink Jeep tours use it all day.
So there are two walk-in routes from pavement. From the Mescal Trailhead on Long Canyon Road, the signed Mescal-Chuckwagon connector reaches the bridge trail in about a mile, for 4.0 miles round trip. From Dry Creek Vista, at the end of the paved road, the Chuckwagon Trail rolls 2.1 miles to the same junction, for 5.8 miles round trip. Neither has shade. What you get is the Sedona picture and a decent morning walk; what you do not get, at any hour after 9, is the place to yourself.
How to hike Devil’s Bridge right
Pay or ride. A Red Rock Pass ($5 a day, $15 a week, $20 a year, from the machine or recreation.gov) or an America the Beautiful pass goes on the dash at Dry Creek Vista or Mescal. Shuttle riders pay nothing. There are no reservations.
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 west about 3 miles through West Sedona to Dry Creek Road, right. Two miles north the pavement forks: the right fork is FR 152 (dirt, high clearance) and the Dry Creek Vista lot is at the end of the pavement just past the fork. For Mescal, stay on the paved road to the stop sign at Long Canyon Road, turn right, and the small lot is 0.2 miles on the right. About 2 hours 10 minutes from Old Town; see the day trips guide for how to stack it with the rest of Sedona.
Or skip the lots. The free Sedona Shuttle Route 11 leaves the West SR 89A Park and Ride (905 Upper Red Rock Loop Road) every 30 minutes, Thursday through Sunday, 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., for Dry Creek Vista and Mescal, and runs daily during spring break and holiday weeks. Unlike Cathedral Rock and Soldier Pass, these lots stay open to cars while the shuttle runs; they just fill by 8 on a good weekend.
Start from Mescal. It is nearly two miles shorter round trip than Dry Creek Vista, the connector is prettier than the Chuckwagon rollers, and the small lot empties earlier because fewer people know it is the shorter way. Be walking by 7 on a cool-season weekend, or ride the first 7:00 shuttle, and you will reach the arch before the line forms; by 10 the wait on top can be half an hour.
Pick the season. October through April is prime. The whole approach is in the open at 4,500 feet, so from May to September treat it as a first-light hike finished by 10, with the summer rules in effect. The rock on top holds heat and ice equally well, and a monsoon afternoon puts lightning on an exposed span.
Water and toilets. Vault toilets at Dry Creek Vista; nothing at Mescal or the bridge. No water anywhere. Carry at least a liter per person in cool weather, two in warm. Leashed dogs are allowed; the stone steps near the top are hard on paws.
Respect the arch. About five feet wide at the narrowest, 50 feet down on either side. Walk out one at a time, do not stand on it while someone else is crossing, do not pose at the edge in wind, and skip it entirely when wet or icy. The staircase up is the only steep section and is fine in trail shoes. If you have a real high-clearance truck, FR 152 to the official trailhead saves the miles, but expect jeep tours both ways and no room to turn around.
Skip it if you want solitude; this is the most visited trail in Sedona. Boynton Canyon, ten minutes up the road, is longer, shadier and half as crowded, and the Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte loop is the easy alternative on the south side of town.
A jeep road, a plane crash and a photo line
The red rock country was lived in long before it was looked at. Between about 1150 and 1350 Sinagua farmers built the cliff dwellings at Palatki and Honanki, a few miles west of Dry Creek, and left rock art on the canyon walls that the Forest Service still guards. Later the land around the creeks was Yavapai and Dilzhe’e Apache country. In 1871 the government drew the Rio Verde Reservation along the river to the south, and in late February 1875 the Army forced some 1,400 to 1,500 Yavapai and Apache people off it on a 180-mile march through the mountains to San Carlos; more than a hundred died on the way. The Yavapai-Apache Nation, which regained land along the Verde in the twentieth century, marks the date as Exodus Day.
Anglo Sedona was ranches and orchards along Oak Creek, and Dry Creek was the back country behind it, reached by a dirt road up the wash. The road earned a name in January 1938, when the aircraft designer Jerry Vultee and his wife Sylvia flew into a blizzard and crashed on the mesas above; the arch at the end of the road, nearly unknown until then, became Vultee Arch, and FR 152 is still the road to it. The track to Devil’s Bridge branched off as a jeep road, which is why the official trail starts as an old roadbed.
Protection came in 1984. The Arizona Wilderness Act, signed August 28, drew the Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness around the cliffs and canyons behind Dry Creek, about 43,950 acres by the wilderness system’s count, and its own description lists the Devil’s Bridge Trail among its routes. Fees followed. By 2000 the Forest Service was charging a Red Rock Pass under the 1996 federal fee demonstration program, and opponents were already contesting it. In November 2009 a retired Sedona geophysicist named Jim Smith was ticketed at the Vultee Arch trailhead on this road; in 2010 a federal magistrate ruled that the Coconino could not charge at undeveloped trailheads, and the forest pulled fees back to sites with toilets and tables. That is why the pass today buys parking at developed lots like Dry Creek Vista and Mescal.
Then the arch went viral. Through the 2010s the photo of a lone hiker on the span became Sedona’s calling card, the jeep road filled with rental crossovers that should not have been on it, and the paved lots overflowed onto Dry Creek Road. The City of Sedona’s answer was the free Sedona Shuttle, launched on March 24, 2022 with a Dry Creek Vista stop and a Mescal stop added that June. It logged more than 213,000 boardings in its first nine months.
Why it matters
Devil’s Bridge is Sedona’s whole tourism problem on one sandstone span: a thousand years of human history in the canyons around it, a wilderness boundary drawn in 1984, a fee fight that reached federal court, and a photograph that brought more people than the roads could carry. The shuttle is the most honest fix anyone has tried, and it works if you use it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is clear: go on a cool-season weekday, start from Mescal or the first shuttle, be on the arch before 9, and walk out one at a time. If the line is long, turn around and go to Boynton Canyon, which nobody photographs and everyone should.