Phoenix to Sedona: Three Good Stops
Leaving from somewhere else? Change the start and see your stops right now — free, no signup.
About 120 miles up I-17 and one of the biggest landscape changes you can drive in two hours — saguaro desert at 1,100 feet to red rock and pine at 4,500. Most people do it as a straight shot and arrive in Sedona traffic. Here is where we get out: a cliff dwelling off the exit ramp, a copper town clinging to a mountainside, and the canyon road everyone skips.
- 120 miles
- 2 hr 15 min driving
- I-17 N · AZ-260 · AZ-89A
- Easy day trip, better as an overnight
The direct version of this drive is I-17 to exit 298 and straight into Sedona on AZ-179, and it takes about two hours. It is also the version where you climb 3,400 feet through some of the best scenery in Arizona while staring at the back of a truck. The detour in this guide adds roughly 40 minutes of driving and turns a transfer into the actual trip.
Two things to know before you set off. You gain serious elevation — Phoenix is at 1,100 feet, Sedona at 4,300, Flagstaff beyond it at 7,000 — so a 100°F morning in the valley can be a 70°F afternoon in the pines and a cold evening on a patio. Take a layer. And most of the trailheads and viewpoints around Sedona sit on Coconino National Forest land that needs a Red Rock Pass displayed in the windscreen; day passes are sold at vending machines at the main trailheads and at the visitor centre, and America the Beautiful passes count.
One more: Sedona parking is the real bottleneck, not the road. The main trailheads fill by 8am on weekends and there is a free shuttle from park-and-ride lots to the busiest ones. Plan your hiking for early morning and your driving for the middle of the day, not the other way round.
Stop 1 — Montezuma Castle National Monument
Mile 90 · exit 289 off I-17 · 45 minutes to 1 hour
Five storeys of rooms built into a limestone cliff sixty feet up, put there by the Sinagua people around 1100 and still mostly intact nine hundred years later. It is one of the best-preserved cliff dwellings in North America and it is three minutes from the interstate, which is why it is the easiest good stop on this drive to justify.
The visit is a flat paved loop of about a third of a mile along Beaver Creek, with the dwelling above you the whole way. You cannot go up into it — climbing was stopped in the 1950s after the ladders wore the rooms out — so an hour is plenty. There is a per-person entrance fee, free on federal fee-free days, and your ticket also covers Tuzigoot near Cottonwood for seven days, which is conveniently on the detour ahead.
If you have an extra half hour, Montezuma Well is eleven miles further on: a limestone sinkhole spring pushing out a million and a half gallons of warm water a day, with irrigation ditches the Sinagua cut that farmers were still using in living memory. Almost nobody driving to Sedona knows it exists.
Stop 2 — Jerome
Mile 105 via the detour · AZ-260 then AZ-89A · 1 to 2 hours
Leave I-17 at Camp Verde, take AZ-260 west to Cottonwood, and then AZ-89A starts switchbacking up Cleopatra Hill to a town built at a 30-degree angle 2,000 feet above the valley floor. Jerome was a copper camp of 15,000 people, then a near-ghost town of fewer than a hundred, and is now a few crooked streets of galleries, tasting rooms and old brick buildings that are visibly still sliding downhill — the jail moved 225 feet from where it was built.
Park at the first space you see, because you will not find a better one, and walk. The view east across the Verde Valley takes in the red rocks of Sedona and the San Francisco Peaks behind them, which is the single best preview of where you are going. The Douglas Mansion at Jerome State Historic Park explains the mining, and Tuzigoot National Monument — the hilltop pueblo you can see from the road down in Clarkdale — is covered by your Montezuma Castle ticket.
The drive up and over is narrow, steep and full of switchbacks with no guardrail in places. It is perfectly manageable in any car in daylight, but it is not the road for a first-time driver of a big rented RV, and an self-guided audio tour for the red rock drive is worth more here than anywhere, because none of what you are looking at is signposted.
Tell us where you are leaving from, when, and who is in the car — dog, toddler, EV, six-hour limit — and we will name the stops that actually fit. Your first trip is free, no card.
Stop 3 — Oak Creek Canyon and Slide Rock
Mile 127 · AZ-89A north of Sedona · 1 to 3 hours
Everyone stops in Sedona. Far fewer keep going seven miles north on AZ-89A into Oak Creek Canyon, where the road narrows, the walls close in to a thousand feet of red and buff sandstone, and the desert is suddenly replaced by sycamores and a creek running beside you.
Slide Rock State Park is the reason to stop: an old apple farm on a stretch of creek where the water has polished a natural chute in the sandstone that people have been sliding down for a century. It is genuinely fun and genuinely cold, the algae makes the rock slick, and in summer the car park fills before 10am and then closes until someone leaves. Go early, or go in October when the canyon turns yellow and you have it nearly to yourself.
Carry on another twelve miles and the road climbs the canyon wall in a set of switchbacks to the Oak Creek Vista at the top, looking back down the whole gorge — ten minutes of your life for the best view on the drive. Turn round there, or keep going to Flagstaff if you are heading on to the Grand Canyon.
Back in Sedona itself, the short list is Airport Mesa for sunset, Cathedral Rock from the Back O' Beyond trailhead, and the Chapel of the Holy Cross. If you want a pink jeep trip up Broken Arrow, a hot air balloon at dawn or a guided vortex hike, book the jeep tours and Sedona experiences ahead — weekends sell out days in advance.
How we would time it
Day trip: leave Phoenix at 7am, Montezuma Castle by 8:30, Jerome from 10 until lunch, into Sedona early afternoon, Oak Creek Canyon and the vista late, home by dark — long but doable. Overnight is much better: same first day, sleep in Sedona or Cottonwood, and use the second morning for a trailhead at sunrise before the lots fill, then take AZ-179 south past Bell Rock back to I-17 for an easy run home.
Booking the rest of it
Most people fly into Phoenix Sky Harbor and rent there — the counters are competitive if you book ahead rather than walk up. Compare EconomyBookings and GetRentacar. Any normal car does this route fine; you do not need four-wheel drive unless you are heading onto the forest roads, and if you are driving an EV, charge in Camp Verde or Cottonwood rather than counting on Jerome.
The three stops on a map
Stops in driving order. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
How long is the drive from Phoenix to Sedona?
About 120 miles and two hours straight up I-17 and AZ-179. Going the scenic way through Camp Verde, Cottonwood and Jerome on AZ-260 and AZ-89A adds roughly 40 minutes of driving and most of the reason to make the trip.
What are the best stops between Phoenix and Sedona?
Montezuma Castle National Monument at exit 289, a 900-year-old cliff dwelling three minutes off the interstate; the old copper town of Jerome on the side of Cleopatra Hill; and Slide Rock State Park in Oak Creek Canyon just north of Sedona.
Is the drive from Phoenix to Sedona difficult?
The I-17 route is an easy four-lane climb. The Jerome detour on AZ-89A is narrow and steep with switchbacks and few guardrails — fine in any car in daylight, less fun in a large RV or after dark.
Do you need a pass to park in Sedona?
Most Coconino National Forest trailheads around Sedona require a Red Rock Pass in the windscreen, sold at trailhead machines and the visitor centre; an America the Beautiful pass also works. State parks like Slide Rock charge their own per-car fee instead.
Now let us do this for your drive
Every stop above is one we would take ourselves — but it is our day, not yours. Change the departure time, the driving limit, the dog in the back seat, the EV that needs a charger every 200 miles, and the right stops change with it. That is the whole thing we built: you tell us the trip, we name the three good stops, with the drive math already done.
Leaving from somewhere else? Change the start and see your stops right now — free, no signup.
Seeing your stops is free. The full plan — clock times, weather, what is open when you arrive — is free for your first trip, then 99¢ for three trips or $2.99 a month. If you just want to browse, we have stop-by-stop pages for thousands of routes.
We write one new drive a week — three real towns, the drive math, what we would skip. Leave an email and we will send them as they go up. No more than one a week, unsubscribe in a click.
Updated 2026-09-11. Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through one, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes which stops we pick — no business on this page paid to be here.