If you’ve visited Sedona during peak season — fall or spring — sometime in the past few years, you may have noticed the growing number of visitors and the shrinking number of parking spots. With more people visiting Sedona, parking lots have been filling up regularly and illegal parking has become a bigger issue.
Last week, the City of Sedona launched a new trailhead shuttle service to help mitigate some of the issues. The shuttle will service some of the most popular trail networks in the area including Cathedral Rock, Dry Creek, Little Horse, and Soldier Pass.
AZ Central reports a 5% increase in visitation to Sedona in 2020, for a total of 3.4 million visitors that year. Overnight trips have decreased but day trips from Arizona residents are estimated to have increased by 10%. April and May, and September and October, tend to be the busiest months for the city according to data from the Sedona Chamber of Commerce.
The major concerns which prompted the new shuttle are traffic, congestion, and resource protection.
“We are still on the northern Sonoran Desert, so it’s a very fragile environment as far as rehabilitation from damage and car tracks and things like that,” Mark Goshorn of the Red Rock Ranger District told AZ Central. “And for people who are parking within neighborhoods, it’s disrupting the quality of life for the citizens that live there.” The trailhead transit program was proposed last fall.
The Sedona Shuttle will run from Thursday through Sundays, from 8a to 6:30p every 15 to 45 minutes. During peak visitation periods, the shuttle will run seven days a week.
A news release from the City of Sedona says that when the shuttles are running, the parking lots at the Cathedral Rock and Soldier Pass trailheads will be closed and visitors will have to use the shuttle to access these trailheads. The shuttle is free to use and picks up at these locations:
- Trailhead shuttles serving Cathedral Rock and Little Horse trailheads will pick up from the North SR 179 park-and-ride lot located at 1294 SR 179.
- Service to Soldier Pass and Dry Creek trailheads will operate from the Posse Grounds park-and-ride lot at 20 Carruth Dr. in West Sedona. Later this summer, service to Mescal trailhead will be added from this lot.
Bike transportation will be limited: the shuttles can hold about 20 passengers each, but only three bikes can go on a rack.
For more information, check out the Sedona Shuttle site.
While the shuttle system sounds great upfront, the lack of bicycle capacity seems like something went awry in planning. How do folks get to the trailhead with the intent to ride bikes on some of earth’s finest trail systems? If the trailhead lot is closed for transport of bikes to and from, something was omitted! Hopefully, that will be sorted in the near term to make this opportunity the best it can be
It is a great idea as Sedona has become an amusement park all summer. When I first went 15 years ago there was maybe 1/10th the current traffic. Hope they work out the kinks and make it convenient.
The new Sedona shuttle buses don’t really limit MTB access on the Sedona non-motorized trail system.
Sedona is a unique mountain bike destination because unlike Moab or other destinations you can pretty munch access a cool fun trail from wherever you are located. What the shuttles have done at the Cathedral and Soldiers Wash trails is increase the hiker traffic as much or more than 100%.
The Sedona shuttle buses now run on a 15 minute turnaround schedules at those two areas.
What I am curious about is what the individual cost is to shuttle hikers to the Littlehorse, Dry Creek Vista and Mescal Parking areas?
Currently in Sedona there are so many visitors that the City is swimming in Bed Tax and Sales Tax revenue. The City is hoping that the new shuttles will greatly (?) reduce traffic in Sedona. It will be interesting if a study will be done to show how much traffic has been reduced. I still see parking lots filled to capacity at Dry Creek Vista and Mescal which just had forty new parking stops built.