Flying Into Flagstaff Pulliam: Getting Down to Sedona on Schedule
The aircraft stops on the ramp, and the stairs come down. You cross a short stretch of open asphalt, pass through one set of doors, take a bag off a single belt, and step out the far side onto a curb with pine trees behind it. Getting out of Flagstaff Pulliam does not take long.
Then the second half of the trip begins, and it is still ahead of you. Sedona sits below the rim, and the vehicle waiting for you has a choice to make about how to get down there. Two roads leave the interchange outside the terminal. One of them is less than half as long as the other and takes about the same time, which is worth knowing before you land.
The Curb Outside a One-Runway Terminal
Pulliam is located about five miles south of Flagstaff, and the City of Flagstaff owns and operates it. There is one runway, numbered 3 and 21, 8,800 feet long and 150 feet wide, and one passenger terminal beside it at ground level. A driver holding a sign with your name is standing in view of the doors, and the meeting takes about as long as it takes to read the sign.
Outside, the airport road meets Interstate 17 at exit 337. That interchange is the way in and out of Pulliam, and it is also where State Route 89A leaves the interstate and heads south toward Oak Creek Canyon. So the road choice for a Sedona arrival is not made somewhere down the line. It gets made at the end of the airport driveway, by whoever is driving you.
Which Road Takes You Down to Sedona?
Take 89A, and you go straight over the edge. From the interchange at the airport, the junction at milepost 399 on SR 89A and the roundabout where the road meets SR 179 in Sedona at milepost 374 make the canyon route close to twenty-five miles end to end. Take the interstate, and you go the other way first, south on I-17 for thirty-eight miles, from the Pulliam interchange down to exit 298, then north again on SR 179 for its full fourteen and a half miles into town. That comes out near fifty-three miles. The interstate version of this drive is more than twice as long as the canyon version.
The times do not separate the same way. Thirty-eight of those miles are divided interstate and go by at highway speed, while the fourteen and a half on SR 179 do not, because that road runs through the Village of Oak Creek and into Sedona on a run of roundabouts. Add the two halves together, and the long way has you there in close to an hour. The canyon route, at less than half the distance, comes in close to an hour as well.
Distance does not separate them, then, and on a clear weekday the clock barely does either. The difference lies in how firmly each road holds its own number, and only one of the two holds a number it controls.
One of them is a rural two-lane highway that people drive for its own sake. The other is an interstate. That gap is the whole choice.
Two Lanes and the Traffic That Uses Them
The fifteen-mile stretch of SR 89A between Sedona and Flagstaff is signed as the Oak Creek Canyon Scenic Drive, and the name is doing real work. The people ahead of you are not using that road to get somewhere else. They are on it because the road is the destination, which means they stop, and the places they stop at were never built to hold the line that forms behind them.
That has a direct effect on an arrival time. SR 89A is too narrow to keep a lane running in each direction through a work zone, and a road that tight has no passing lane and little shoulder. One slow vehicle in front of you holds everything behind it to its own speed, with nowhere to pull over and let the line go by.
The same features cut the other way through the year. The canyon holds shade and water, which fills it when the weather is warm, and it holds ice at the top of the switchbacks when the weather is not, well after the streets in Sedona have dried. Whoever is driving you works from the day in front of them.
Taking the Long Way on Purpose
The choice belongs to the person driving you, and it is a working judgment rather than a preference. It gets made based on the condition of the road that morning, and it can be remade at the interchange if the morning has changed since the vehicle left.
A professional driver takes I-17 and SR 179 on plenty of clear days, and the reasons are practical ones. A larger vehicle carrying a full load behind it handles a hairpin turn differently from a sedan, and the driver knows that before setting off. If your group is moving in two vehicles, they keep station far more easily on a divided highway than on a two-lane road where one slow left turn opens a gap between them.
Predictability is the other reason, and it comes into play when you have something scheduled after the arrival. Whether a transfer holds for a late inbound flight is its own question and not this one. The road is the last variable standing between a booked pickup and a booked arrival, and on a day with weather in it, the longer road carries less of that variability.
The Road With No Local Way Around It
A vehicle that starts down the canyon road on a day it is not open leaves you far more than a few minutes behind. The signed detour for a closure in Oak Creek Canyon puts Flagstaff-to-Sedona traffic onto I-17 and SR 179, which is the entire other route, taken from the top.
There is no local alternative because the canyon holds exactly one road. The corridor is a highway cut into rock faces that erode with the weather, dropping rock and sediment onto the pavement, and it has already had several emergency closures due to rockfalls blocking the roadway.
What the substitution takes out of a schedule depends on where a trip starts and ends. The detour adds about an hour of travel, a figure that applies to trips beginning inside the canyon itself, where the way around runs the long way in both directions. A run that takes you from the airport straight through to Sedona gives up a good deal less.
A vehicle already into the descent has to climb back out before it can go anywhere else, which puts the choice behind you at the interchange and nowhere later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Almost immediately. The canyon runs about fifteen miles from the Sedona end up to the switchbacks at its northern end, and the switchbacks themselves start roughly fourteen miles in, just past Pumphouse Wash. Coming down from the airport, you meet the switchbacks first and the canyon floor afterward, so the tightest part of your drive is behind you inside the first few miles.
Not once the vehicle is past the interchange. The two roads do not touch again between the airport and Sedona, so there is no crossover for your driver to use and no shortcut back to the interstate. If your plans change while you are moving, the choice is to keep going or to turn around and climb back up to where you started. It is why the drop-off gets settled with you before you leave the curb.
At Oak Creek Vista. A canyon closure is planned around turnaround points on either side, and the southbound one is the vista at the top, with Cave Springs Campground serving vehicles coming the other way. Past the vista, your driver is into the descent, and the only way back toward your starting point is up. If you want a look at the canyon before you drop into it, take it there while you can.
No. SR 179's northern end is a roundabout at SR 89A, the same junction the canyon road enters Sedona at, so both routes end at one intersection and continue to the same address from there, whichever one your driver picked. What changes is the approach. One brings you in from the north out of the canyon, the other from the south across open red rock.
A long way in both directions. SR 89A runs about eighty-four miles total, from the Prescott side through the Verde Valley, up through Sedona and on to Flagstaff, so the canyon your driver brings you down is one segment of it. If you are staying in Sedona, the same route number carries you out to Cottonwood later on.
Not on the scenery. The stretch of SR 179 up into Sedona is the Red Rock Scenic Byway, which holds the All-American Road designation, the top tier of federal scenic byway status. The long way finishes on it. The canyon road has its own following and is signed as a scenic drive too, but the federal designation sits on the other one. The drive down is not the dull part of your trip.
Book your transfer against the inbound flight — a driver and vehicle are at the curb for your arrival time, and the road down is picked on the day for the conditions on it. Western Express Shuttle Service and Tours serves Sedona, Flagstaff, Phoenix Sky Harbor, and northern Arizona's Verde Valley and Rim Country. Call (928) 202-4071.
