What is Red Rock State Park?
The land was Jack and Helen Frye’s Smoke Trail Ranch, whose unfinished stone House of Apache Fires still stands above the creek; the state took title in 1986 and opened the park in 1991 on the condition that it be run as a nature preserve and environmental education center. That origin explains the rules. No pets. No swimming or wading. A visitor center, the Miller Visitor Center, with exhibits, a theater and a store that is better than it needs to be, and a calendar of ranger-led bird walks and full-moon hikes that are the best interpretive programs in the Sedona area.
The park is 286 acres on a long bend of Oak Creek below the red rock country, with about 5 miles of trails in interconnecting loops. The low ones follow the creek through cottonwood, sycamore and willow, flat and shaded, with the Kingfisher Bridge crossing to the far bank. The higher ones, Eagle’s Nest and Apache Fire, climb a few hundred feet onto the ridges south of the creek to overlooks where Cathedral Rock stands up across the valley with nothing in front of it. None of it is hard. All of it is pretty, and on a January weekday you may have the overlook to yourself.
What you get is shade, water you can look at, a parking space, and the most patient naturalists in Sedona. What you do not get is a dog, a swim, a summit or a bargain; at $10 a head it is the most expensive easy walk in the Verde Valley, and it is worth it exactly as often as the free trailheads are full.
How to visit it right
Pay at the gate, no reservation. $10 per adult (14 and up), $5 for ages 7 to 13, free under 7, $5 for walk-ins and cyclists. The Red Rock Pass is not valid here, and neither is a national parks pass; this is Arizona State Parks. Group ramadas at Twin Cypress can be reserved; everything else is walk-in.
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 4 miles to Lower Red Rock Loop Road, left, and 3 miles of paved two-lane down to the park entrance. Figure 2 hours 10 minutes from Old Town. Coming from Dead Horse Ranch in Cottonwood it is 20 minutes. The lot is paved, ample, and has never in our experience been full. Gates open at 8, last entry 4:30, and they lock at 5.
Keep the hours in mind. Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, visitor center 9 to 4:30, closed Christmas Day, short hours Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. There is no dawn or dusk here; the full-moon hikes are the only after-hours access, and they are led.
Pick the season by the loop. The creek loops are walkable year-round at opening, and in July the Kisva Trail under the sycamores is one of the few genuinely cool walks in Sedona. The ridge loops are full sun: October through April, or first thing in summer. Spring brings the warblers and the bird walks; winter brings the stillest mornings.
Respect the two rules. No pets, anywhere, and no swimming or wading. If either is a dealbreaker, Slide Rock has the water (dogs banned in summer there too) and the Forest Service trailheads take leashed dogs.
Water and facilities. Flush restrooms and water at the visitor center and the Twin Cypress group area, picnic tables and reservable shelters, shade along the creek. Nothing on the ridge loops; carry water in the warm months.
Do the program. The bird walks and moonlight hikes are the reason regulars come back; check the park calendar and reserve where it asks. The guides know the creek better than any app.
Skip it if you want a real climb or a swim. Cathedral Rock itself is 15 minutes away, and the Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte loop is the better free walk; this park is where you look at the rocks, not where you scramble them. It pairs well with the Verde Valley ruins on a day trip from Scottsdale.
The ranch a governor got thrown off
Oak Creek’s lower terraces were farmed by the Sinagua long before anyone homesteaded them, and the Yavapai and Tonto Apache who followed were marched from the Verde Valley to San Carlos in 1875, returning a generation later to the small reservations around Camp Verde and Clarkdale. The Anglo record on this bend of the creek begins in the 1890s, when Henry Schuerman worked a 20-acre parcel near today’s shop area. Richard Huckaby patented 80 acres in 1900, the first permanent Anglo resident; Schuerman bought him out in 1901, and Schuerman’s son Fritz built the frame Willow House in 1931 after his father’s death. Juan and Ambrosio Armijo took up three homesteads on the west end in 1913, 1927 and 1939. Five homesteads in all, and all of them are inside the park today.
In 1941 the homesteads were bought up by Jack Frye, president of Trans World Airlines, and his wife Helen, who assembled about 700 acres into the Smoke Trail Ranch as a retreat from Kansas City. In the late 1940s they began the House of Apache Fires on the bluff above the creek, a stone house built in part by Yavapai-Apache workers and named, by the Fryes’ account, for the fires those workers lit along the bank. The marriage ended before the house did, and it was never finished. Helen Frye kept the ranch, sold pieces of it, and in the early 1970s sold the remaining 330-odd acres to a developer who ran out of money. In 1976 the property passed to Eckankar, a religious movement she belonged to.
The park owes its existence to a trespass. In the fall of 1980, Eckankar staff asked a hiking party to leave the property; one of the hikers was Governor Bruce Babbitt. Within months the state had a plan. On April 27, 1981 Babbitt signed Senate Bill 1184, authorizing a cross-county land exchange; on July 22, 1981 Anamax Mining Company bought the 286-acre parcel from Eckankar for $5,148,000 and that fall traded it to the State Land Department for 3,947 acres of trust land in Pima County. The Parks Board approved a master plan on December 4, 1981, and a park seemed a year or two away.
It took ten. Budget cuts in 1982 and 1983 eliminated 15 State Parks positions and more than $500,000 in operating funds, and the project stalled; volunteers from the Arizona chapter of the American Planning Association ran a design charrette in 1983 that won a national award but built nothing. The land itself, held by the Land Department, had to be moved to State Parks through a federal Recreation and Public Purposes patent tied to a land disposal at Lake Havasu, and a National Wildlife Federation lawsuit delayed that too. State Parks finally took title on November 7, 1986, and named the place Red Rock State Park, dropping the earlier Lower Oak Creek and Smoke Trail Ranch names. ADOT designed the entrance road in 1987. The park was dedicated and opened on October 19, 1991, with the preserve-and-education mandate written into its purpose, which is why dogs and swimmers have never been allowed.
The House of Apache Fires has stood unfinished on its bluff through all of it, fenced, visible from the Apache Fire and Kisva trails, periodically studied for stabilization and never opened. The park around it has changed little since 1991: the Miller Visitor Center, the loop system, the bird walks, and 1.4 miles of a creek that is for looking at.
Why it matters
Red Rock State Park is what Sedona would look like if someone had said no in 1980. Every other piece of Oak Creek below the canyon was homesteaded, subdivided or sold to a resort; this bend was saved because a governor got asked to leave a ranch and had the Legislature and a mining company’s land swap at hand. It also explains why Arizona’s state parks are the way they are: ten years from purchase to opening, budget cuts in between, a mandate written to keep the place quiet. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple. If the Red Rock Pass trailheads are full, or the group includes a grandparent, a toddler or anyone who wants to learn the birds, pay the $10 and walk to Eagle’s Nest. If you came to climb Cathedral Rock, drive past.