What is Slide Rock State Park?
Where Oak Creek crosses a ledge of red sandstone 7 miles north of Sedona, it has cut a chute 80 feet long, 2.5 to 4 feet wide, dropping about 7 percent from top to bottom, polished by sand and algae to the point that you sit down at the top and arrive at the bottom whether you meant to or not. Above and below are pools, ledges and a swim area nearly half a mile long under red walls. The water comes off the Rim and is cold even in July. It is, on a quiet morning, one of the best swims in the Southwest.
The slide sits in a 43-acre state park built around the old Pendley homestead: the apple orchard that still stands between the highway and the water, the homestead house (1927), the packing shed (1932) and three tourist cabins from 1933. Flush restrooms, a drinking fountain, 15 first-come picnic areas, two reservable ramadas and a small market selling ice, snacks and sunscreen fill out the rest. There is no camping.
It is rarely quiet. The lot is small and admission is by car only; from Memorial Day to Labor Day the gate closes when the lot fills, typically before mid-morning on weekends, and 278,330 people came through it in 2024. What you get on a weekday at opening in June is a genuinely great swim. What you get at noon on a July Saturday is turned around on the highway.
How to do Slide Rock right
Pay at the gate, by car. $30 per vehicle (1 to 4 adults) from May 1 to August 21, 2026, $20 from August 22 through April 2027, $5 per extra adult, kids under 6 free. Card strongly preferred; cash must be exact. The Red Rock Pass and America the Beautiful pass are not valid; this is a state park. There are no reservations, and no walk-ins, drop-offs or bicycles.
Get there early. Loop 101 north to I-17, north about 80 miles to exit 298, SR 179 15 miles through the Village of Oak Creek to the Sedona Y, then SR 89A north 7 miles up Oak Creek Canyon; the entrance is on the left (west) just past Manzanita Campground. About 2 hours 15 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Arrive at 7:45 on a weekday in early June, before school lets out in the Valley, and you will have the slide to yourself for an hour. In summer the canyon road backs up behind the entrance station; you may not queue or park on the highway, and if the sign at the Y says the lot is full, believe it.
Know the hours. 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. from January 31 to November 20, with entry and the swim area closing at 5; 9 to 5 from November 21 to January 30, closing at 4. Last entry an hour before closing. Closed Christmas Day.
Check the water before you leave. Two kinds of closure are common: high water after storms, especially in monsoon season when the creek can flash flood, and summer E. coli advisories. Both shut the swim area while the park stays open and the fee stays on. Check azstateparks.com the morning you drive.
Dress for the rock. It is slick algae over hard sandstone. Wear water shoes with real soles to the edge and old shorts or cutoffs down the chute, because the sandstone shreds swimsuits. The park sees a steady run of scraped backs and the occasional broken wrist. Kids under 8 should go down with an adult below them; the kids guide has easier outings. No glass anywhere near the creek. The pools above the slide are deeper and quieter, and the ledges below are where the jumpers go.
Pick the season. Swimming is late May through September; the slide runs best in June and after monsoon rains. October is for the orchard, fall color and empty rocks. There is no apple picking in fall 2026.
Dogs. Never in the creek area, and not in the park at all from May 1 to September 30. In the cool months leashed dogs may visit the orchard and picnic areas.
Skip it if it is a summer weekend and you did not leave Scottsdale by 6. Grasshopper Point, 5 miles south, is the $15 fallback; West Fork is the better day anyway; and if you want to sleep by the creek, Cave Springs is 6 miles up the canyon. For the rest of Sedona, see the day-trips guide and, for a quieter state park on the same creek, Red Rock.
An apple farm that grew a water slide
The slide is older than any of its visitors. Oak Creek runs down a fault-line canyon below the Rim, and where it crosses this ledge of red sandstone it has been grinding a channel for a very long time. The first people to know it were Sinagua farmers, whose small cliff dwellings survive in the side canyons, and after them the Yavapai and the Dilzhe’e (Tonto) Apache, who used the canyon from the Verde Valley up to the Rim. In 1875 the Army marched the Verde Valley’s Yavapai and Apache to the San Carlos reservation, and homesteaders came up the creek almost at once.
Frank L. Pendley arrived in 1907 and took the flat just south of the slide. He gained title under the Homestead Act in 1910, and by 1912 he had cut an irrigation system into the canyon, one the park still partly uses, and planted the apple orchard that is still there. It was a hard place to farm: narrow, shaded, cold at night and a long wagon haul from any market. Then the road arrived. In 1914 a small wooden bridge at Slide Rock completed the first route all the way from Sedona to Flagstaff, and the Pendley place went from an isolated farm to a stop on a highway.
The family adapted. They built the homestead house in 1927, an apple packing shed in 1932 and, in 1933, three rustic tourist cabins for the motorists the road was bringing up the canyon, part of the same wave that paved it by 1938. For the next half century the orchard and the cabins ran side by side with an increasingly famous swimming hole on the creek below, used by everyone in northern Arizona and owned by a farm family.
In 1982 the Pendleys decided to sell. The Arizona Parklands Foundation bought the land on February 7, 1985 for $3.6 million, and the State Parks Board acquired it from the foundation on July 9, 1985 for $3,757,324.65. Slide Rock State Park opened in October 1987, and in 1991 the farm buildings were listed on the National Register as the Pendley Homestead Historic District. The state kept the orchard working, which is why the park is half apple farm and half swimming hole.
The pressures since are the ones you see at the gate. Visitation is now above a quarter million a year, the lot is the limiting factor, and the park runs on car-only admission, seasonal pricing and a gate that closes when the lot fills. Summer bacteria counts close the swim area most seasons. And on May 20, 2014, the human-caused Slide Fire started just north of the park, closed it and the whole canyon, and burned 21,227 acres of the west side before it was contained on June 4; afterward the Sedona Fire District put warning sirens in the canyon.
Why it matters
Slide Rock is what happens when a famous natural feature lands on private land and the state has to buy its way in. It explains a pattern repeated across Arizona’s canyons: homesteaders took the flat ground by the water, the road turned their farms into tourist stops, and the public got access back only by purchase. It is also a lesson in carrying capacity, a 43-acre park absorbing a quarter million visitors through one small lot. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is blunt: it is worth the drive on a June weekday at opening, in old shorts and water shoes, and not worth it on a summer weekend after 9.