What is the West Fork of Oak Creek Trail?
Nine and a half miles up Oak Creek Canyon from Sedona, a side canyon comes in from the west so narrow and deep you do not see it from the highway. The West Fork of Oak Creek runs down it from the Mogollon Rim, and the first 3 miles of that canyon are the best easy hike in Arizona. Trail No. 108 is nearly flat, gaining about 220 feet from 5,325 feet at the trailhead, mostly in shade under box elder, bigtooth maple and ponderosa, and it crosses the creek roughly a dozen times on stepping stones. The walls close in as you go, pale Coconino sandstone over red Schnebly Hill, rising close to 1,000 feet, until at mile three they pinch to a slot with a long pool across it. That is the end of the maintained trail and the turnaround for a day hike: 6 miles round trip, two to three hours plus the time you spend standing in the water.
Near the start are the stone ruins of the Mayhew Lodge, the guest lodge where Zane Grey set The Call of the Canyon and Hollywood stayed, which burned in 1980; the pink stone foundations and the orchard are worth a minute.
Past the slot the route is unmaintained, in the streambed, inside the Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness. The full canyon is 14 miles from FR 231 on the Rim down to SR 89A, with mandatory swims, cold water and no exit, and the Forest Service publishes a separate briefing for it. That is a different trip and not this page. What you get here is the best three miles near Sedona; what you do not get is solitude after 9:30 on a fall weekend, or a Red Rock Pass that works.
How to hike the West Fork right
Pay at the gate, with the right pass. $15 per vehicle (up to five people), $4 per walk-in or cyclist, by cash, check or card at the Call of the Canyon gate. This is a concessionaire site: the Red Rock Pass and America the Beautiful pass are not accepted. The Coconino Pass ($25 weekly, $50 annual) is, and also covers Grasshopper Point, Crescent Moon, Beaver Creek and Lower Lake Mary; buy it at the gate if you are doing more than one this trip.
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 9.5 miles up Oak Creek Canyon to the Call of the Canyon Picnic Site on the left (west), about 2.5 miles past Slide Rock. Around 2 hours 20 minutes from Old Town. From Flagstaff it is 17.5 miles down the switchbacks.
Beat the gate. The paved lot is behind a gate with a fee booth. It fills by 9:30 a.m. in summer, during fall color and over spring break, and the attendant closes the gate until cars leave. There is no legal parking on SR 89A. Hours are 7 a.m. to dusk April through September, 8 a.m. to dusk October through March, and the gate locks at close with your car inside. Be in line 15 minutes before opening and you will have the first two miles nearly alone, with the light coming down the walls. Camping at Cave Springs, 3 miles north, or Pine Flat, is the other way to be first.
Pick the season. Fall color peaks in the second half of October into early November and brings the biggest crowds of the year; the week after peak, leaves down and crowds gone, is underrated. Late April to June is green and quiet on weekdays. Winter is beautiful and icy: the first mile stays shaded ice for weeks after a storm, and microspikes are not optional. The trail closes in high fire danger, typically late June until the monsoon.
Dress for the creek. Wear shoes you do not mind soaking and bring a dry pair for the car; the stepping stones are a fiction after any rain and in spring runoff. Vault toilets and picnic tables are at the trailhead, no potable water; the creek is clear and cold and should be filtered.
Respect the slot. The canyon drains a large piece of the Rim and has no high ground in the narrows. Do not go past mile three with storms forecast, and know what a flash flood sounds like in a slot.
Dogs and bikes. Dogs on leash the whole way, waste carried out rather than bagged and left. No bikes; the whole trail is in wilderness.
Skip it if you cannot be at the gate early on a peak weekend. Boynton Canyon in west Sedona is the dry, red-rock alternative, and Slide Rock is the swim.
From Bear Howard’s cabin to a fee gate
Oak Creek Canyon was Yavapai and Dilzhe’e Apache country, and before them the Sinagua farmed the canyons around Sedona and built cliff dwellings in the red rock. In 1875 the Army marched the Yavapai and Apache of the Verde Valley to San Carlos, and the canyon was open to homesteaders within a few years.
The first was a hunter. Around 1880 Charles “Bear” Howard, who by most accounts had escaped from a California jail, built a log cabin at the mouth of the West Fork. The Thomas family bought it soon after, homesteaded the flat and planted orchards. Getting in was the hard part; the canyon had no real road until the 1910s, and even in the 1920s visitors pushed their cars up the grade.
Hollywood made the place famous. Zane Grey’s novel The Call of the Canyon became a silent film in 1923, produced by Jesse Lasky, the co-founder of what became Paramount, and a photographer named Carl Mayhew came west to work on it. He bought the Thomas place in 1925, folded Howard’s cabin into a stone lodge, and ran Mayhew’s Oak Creek Lodge as a retreat for Hollywood guests and Arizona families. Carl died in 1943; his family kept the lodge open until they sold it to the Forest Service in 1969. Empty and unmaintained, it burned to the ground in 1980, leaving the walls you pass in the first quarter mile.
Protection came in layers. The Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984 created the Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness, which takes in the West Fork canyon and keeps bikes and new construction out. Popularity came faster than protection, though, and the Forest Service eventually turned the trailhead into a concessionaire-run fee site, with a gate, a booth and a cap set by the size of the lot. Then on May 20, 2014, a human-caused fire started near Slide Rock and ran north up the canyon and into the West Fork and Harding Point areas. The Slide Fire burned about 21,227 acres before it was contained on June 4, the worst in the history of the Coconino. The canyon bottom recovered quickly; burned slopes above a canyon can send more debris and faster floods into the creek after storms, which is one more reason to respect the narrows.
Why it matters
The West Fork compresses a century of Arizona tourism into three miles. A hunter’s cabin became a homestead, then a Hollywood lodge, then federal land, then a ruin inside a wilderness, and now a fee gate that fills before breakfast. It is also the clearest example near the Valley of a place loved past its capacity, where the solution has been a gate and a price rather than a permit lottery. For a Scottsdale visitor it is still worth every bit of the trouble: arrive at opening, wear shoes you can soak, walk to the pool at mile three, and come back in late October or a quiet May weekday if you can.