What is Lo Lo Mai Springs Outdoor Resort?
Below Sedona, Oak Creek leaves the red rock and winds through the farm country of Page Springs and Cornville toward the Verde, slower and warmer, lined with cottonwoods and sycamores. Lo Lo Mai Springs sits on about three-quarters of a mile of that creek: a private campground and cabin resort that has been taking summer families for more than 50 years and runs on a model closer to an old-fashioned membership camp than a KOA. Sites are shaded, the creek is a few steps from the best of them, and there is a heated pool and spa, three bathhouses with showers, laundry, a store, a clubhouse, a playground, a sports court, horseshoes and shuffleboard.
The RV sites all have water and 30-amp electric, a few have 50-amp, and some of the sites back from the creek have sewer and patio slabs; motorhomes to 40 feet and fifth wheels to 36 feet fit. The tent sites run along the creek under the big trees. Cabins range from one-room log camping cabins to the Cottonwood, Cardinal, Sycamore and Garden House units for families, all with heat, air conditioning and basic kitchen supplies. Every site has a fire ring and a table, and the store lends charcoal grills. It is for families with small children, for RV owners who want shade and a hookup within a short drive of Sedona, and for anyone who has lost the recreation.gov lottery for Manzanita three years running.
What you give up is red rock, cold canyon water and a bargain price. What you get is a reservation you can actually make, hookups, a pool for the hot hours, and a creek that is kid-friendly by late May.
How to camp Lo Lo Mai right
Reserve by phone. The resort does not post prices online, and they move by season. Recent third-party listings put sites at roughly $60 to $110 a night and cabins from about $100, with extra-person, pet and vehicle fees on top; treat those as a range, not a quote. Reservations are required, by phone at 928-634-4700 or through the request form on the website. The office works the phone from 9 to 5 and the creek-front sites go to whoever asks first, so ask for one. Ask about holiday minimum stays and the current pet fee while you have them.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, north about 75 miles to exit 293 (McGuireville/Cornville). Go west on Cornville Road about 10 miles through Cornville, then north on Page Springs Road and left on Lo Lo Mai Road to the office. About 1 hour 55 minutes from Old Town, all paved. From Sedona it is about 20 minutes down Red Rock Loop Road and Page Springs Road; from Dead Horse Ranch in Cottonwood, 15 minutes. Check in at the office before it closes at 5, or arrange a late arrival when you book.
Pick the season. Open all year. Cornville summers hit 100, but the shade and the pool make July workable in a way the open Verde Valley campgrounds are not, and the creek here is warm enough for inner tubes by late May. Spring and fall are ideal; early November turns the cottonwoods gold. Winter is quiet and the cabins have heat.
Water, showers, power. Potable water at every RV site and in the bathhouses, hot showers, laundry, 30-amp at all RV sites and 50-amp and sewer at some. This is the full-service option in the Verde Valley outside the state park.
Plan for no signal. Wi-Fi only near the office and clubhouse; cell coverage is, in the resort’s own words, extremely limited. Download maps and entertainment before you leave the interstate. Most people decide within a day that this is the best thing about the place.
Respect the creek. Lower Oak Creek rises fast after monsoon storms upstream over Sedona. Keep gear and kids out of the channel when there is weather on the red rock, and read the flash flood entry if you have not camped on an Arizona creek before.
Dogs. Leashed outdoors, fee per pet, not in buildings or the pool area.
Fill the afternoon nearby. The Page Springs fish hatchery and the wine tasting rooms along Page Springs Road are five minutes away; Red Rock State Park is 15 minutes, the first red rock trailheads 20, and Tuzigoot and Montezuma Castle are each about half an hour.
Skip it if you want the canyon. Manzanita and the Oak Creek Canyon campgrounds have the red cliffs, the cold water and the $30 price; they are also a reservation contest. If you want a state park with hookups and a lagoon instead of a creek, Dead Horse Ranch is 15 minutes away and books on azstateparks.com.
The creek that leaves the red rock
Oak Creek is the same stream at Cornville that it is at Slide Rock, but the country around it is a different place with a different history. The Verde Valley was Sinagua farmland for most of a millennium, from roughly 500 until the early 1400s, when the people who built Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot walked away for reasons nobody has settled; several Hopi clans say they went north and became Hopi. The Yavapai held the valley after that, and were holding it when the Spanish expedition of Antonio de Espejo came through in May 1583, looking for mines.
Anglo settlement waited on the Army. In 1875 the government marched the Yavapai and Apache of the Verde to San Carlos, and in the spring of 1876 Captain Andrew Jackson and his wife Margaret became the first settlers on lower Oak Creek. The Page family arrived by 1877, and around 1880 James Page bought out two earlier homesteaders at the big springs that feed the creek a few miles above the resort; Page Springs has carried his name since, and the state fish hatchery there uses the same water. Cornville’s post office opened on May 11, 1887, and its name is the valley’s favorite story: the settlers supposedly asked for “Cohnville,” after a local family, and Washington sent the papers back reading “Cornville.” No Cohn family appears in the 1880 census, so the duller theory, that the name honors Cornville, Maine, where the rancher James Dunning Tewksbury was born in 1823, may be the true one. Tewksbury’s sons were about to become famous a hundred miles east, in the Pleasant Valley War.
For the next half century the lower creek was orchards, hay and cattle, and Sedona was a post office with 55 residents. The road changed that. A graded route between Flagstaff and Sedona was finished in 1930 and the whole of what is now SR 89A was paved by 1938; Hollywood had been shooting Westerns among the red rocks since 1923, and by the 1950s Sedona was turning itself into a resort town. The Verde Valley below it stayed agricultural longer, which is why there was still three-quarters of a mile of shaded creek frontage for a private campground to occupy.
Lo Lo Mai Springs does not publish its founding date. The resort says visitors have been staying here in RVs, tents and cabins “for over 50 years,” which places the start in or before the early 1970s, the decade the Forest Service campgrounds up the canyon began filling every summer weekend. The name is not explained either; it resembles the Hopi word loloma, which the jeweler Charles Loloma’s biographers translate as “beauty,” and Hopi place names are common in this valley the Hopi claim as ancestral, but that is an observation, not a documented origin. What is documented is the model: a membership-style camp with a pool, bathhouses and a store, built for repeat summer families rather than overnight travelers, and still run that way.
The country around it has changed more than the campground has. Verde Santa Fe went in across the creek in 1995, Cornville and Page Springs became bedroom communities for Sedona and Cottonwood, and the wineries along Page Springs Road arrived in the 2000s and gave the adults something to do while the children were in the creek. The 2020 census counted 3,362 people in the Cornville CDP. The cottonwoods that shade the sites are older than any of it.
Why it matters
Lo Lo Mai is what Oak Creek looks like once it stops being scenery and goes back to being a creek: warm, slow, shaded by trees that have been there a century, running past farms and a fish hatchery toward the Verde. It explains why the Verde Valley filled with settlers before Sedona did, and why a private campground could hold three-quarters of a mile of waterfront that would be a national forest fee site anywhere upstream. For a Scottsdale family it is the honest trade: you pay two or three times the Forest Service rate, you get a site you can actually reserve, a pool, hookups and water a small child can stand in, and you lose the red cliffs and the phone signal. Call in March for a summer weekend, ask for the creek, and leave the laptop at home.