What is Pine Flat Campground?
Pine Flat is the last campground before SR 89A leaves the creek and climbs the switchbacks to the Mogollon Rim. At 5,545 feet the canyon has narrowed to a V, Oak Creek is a stream you can step across in places, and the trees are ponderosa, Douglas fir and Gambel oak rather than sycamore. The campground’s 59 sites are split by the highway, the larger and better half on the west side against the canyon wall, each with a table, fire ring and grill. Potable water and vault toilets, no showers, no hookups. It is the coolest of the three canyon campgrounds in summer and the first to turn in October.
The creek is small here but it is the headwater reach of the same trout stream, and the fishing is quiet. There is nothing to hike from the campground itself beyond the creek path; the point is to sleep in cold air and drive ten minutes down to West Fork at 7 a.m. before the lot fills, or to Sedona for the red rock, then come back up into the pines.
Chavez Crossing Group Campground is the Forest Service’s answer for groups in Sedona proper: three group sites on Oak Creek 2 miles south of the Y off SR 179, Sycamore and Cypress for 10 to 50 people at $136 a night and Ponderosa for 10 to 30 at $108, reservation only, open year-round, with potable water, in a grove of Arizona sycamore and cypress at 4,079 feet. It is the only legal way for a scout troop or a family reunion to camp on the creek within sight of the red rocks. What you get at either place is a creek, shade and a table in a canyon that is otherwise all private land and state park. What you do not get is a shower, a hookup, a swimming hole at Pine Flat, or quiet from the highway, which is a hundred yards away.
How to camp Pine Flat right
Book six months out. $30 a night, up to 8 people and one vehicle; parties over 8 need a second site. Most sites go on recreation.gov six months ahead; a few first-come sites are sold through the host on site, not by phone. Senior and Access passes take half off; other passes are not accepted. 7-day limit, and the first night must be occupied. Chavez Crossing is reservation only, no walk-ins, same website.
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 the canyon, a mile past Cave Springs. About 2 hours 25 minutes from Old Town. If you are coming from the north, Pine Flat is 14 miles south of Flagstaff and the Rim switchbacks are faster than the canyon crawl. Each site holds one vehicle and a trailer; a second vehicle is $10 and must fit in the site, because there is no overflow lot. The host is on the west side. For Chavez Crossing, drive 2 miles south of the Y on 179 and turn right on Oak Creek Cliffs Drive just past the hotel; the Sycamore site takes RVs to 25 feet, Cypress to 35, and Ponderosa none.
Pick the side and the season. The west side, under the biggest pines against the wall with the creek a few steps away; the east side is closer to the road. Mid-April to late October. Nights are cold the whole season, with frost in April and October and a freeze most October nights; pack for the Rim, not for Sedona. Fall color starts here, usually the second and third weeks of October, and a midweek site then is the best camping night in the region.
Water and toilets. Spigots and vault toilets. No showers, and portable showers and toilets are banned. The nearest showers are at Cave Springs, a mile down.
Fire. Stage 1 and Stage 2 restrictions arrive most years in May and June. Hotline 928-226-4607. Buy firewood from the host at $10 a bag; gathering is not allowed.
Vehicles. Standard RVs and trailers fit; wide-body motorhomes do not. No hookups, no dump station, generators off 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Dogs. Leashed or restrained at all times at both campgrounds; no horses; no amplified music.
Skip it if you came for swimming. The creek is knee-deep here; Slide Rock and Manzanita are where the water is. If you want a lake and a longer season at the same elevation, Pine Grove on Lake Mary is 30 minutes north.
The road that made the canyon a campground
Oak Creek Canyon exists because of a fault. About 8 to 10 million years ago an older canyon formed along the Oak Creek Fault; lava flows and gravels filled it between roughly 6 and 8 million years ago; then the fault moved again and the creek cut the present canyon through the fill, leaving the 6-million-year-old basalt that caps the east rim above Pine Flat and the red and buff sandstones below. The Sinagua farmed the wider canyons downstream from about 1100 to 1300 and left cliff dwellings and pictographs; the Yavapai and Tonto Apache held Oak Creek after them until the Army’s 1875 removal to San Carlos. J. J. Thompson, the first Anglo settler, took up the bottomland at Indian Gardens in 1876, and the Sedona post office opened in 1902 with 55 residents.
For the first fifty years of settlement the upper canyon was reachable only by wagon track and foot. The road is what turned it into a place to camp. The state defined State Route 79 in 1927 from Prescott toward Flagstaff, extended it north to Sedona in 1929, graded a dirt road up the canyon to Flagstaff in 1930, gravelled the southern half in 1934, finished the switchbacks at the top in 1935 and paved the whole route in 1938. It was renumbered US 89A in 1941 and became SR 89A in 1993. Pine Flat sits where that road makes its last crossing of the creek before the climb, and the Forest Service laid out the canyon’s campgrounds along it in the decades after paving, putting this one at the top where the creek was smallest and the pines tallest; the agency’s own pages do not record the year it opened, and a concessionaire runs it today.
The canyon’s modern history is fire. The Brins Fire burned about 4,300 acres above the lower canyon in June 2006. On May 20, 2014 the Slide Fire was reported just north of Slide Rock State Park and ran up the west wall of the canyon for nine days, burning 21,227 acres before it was declared contained on June 4 with more than 1,230 firefighters, 50 crews, 29 engines and 9 helicopters on it. The campgrounds were evacuated and the highway closed; Pine Flat sat above the burn and survived, but the scar on the opposite wall is visible from the switchbacks. Afterward the Sedona Fire District installed nine outdoor warning sirens in the canyon, tested every summer, and the Forest Service’s fire restrictions, which now arrive most years by June, are a direct consequence.
Chavez Crossing has a quieter story, and less of it on record. The group camp sits on a reach of the creek 2 miles below the Sedona Y, in a grove of Arizona sycamore and cypress at 4,079 feet, one of the few pieces of Oak Creek frontage near town still in public hands; the Forest Service does not say who Chavez was or when the site was built. It is the district’s only reservable group camp, and at that elevation it stays open all year.
Why it matters
Pine Flat is where Sedona stops and the Rim begins, which is the whole reason to camp there: it is the coolest public bed within reach of the red rocks, and the 1938 road that made it reachable also made the canyon the most visited piece of national forest in Arizona. The Slide Fire is the modern lesson, that a canyon of pines above a tourist highway is a fire problem as much as a campground. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is simple: book the west side for the third week of October, bring a winter bag, and send any party of more than eight to Chavez Crossing instead of trying to win the Oak Creek lottery.