How to Use This Calendar
Some of you searched for the Film Festival or RunSedona by name and want dates and lodging urgency — start with the Winter section below. Others already have a trip window picked out and want to know what's happening while you're here, or what to steer clear of, since a single festival weekend can jam Uptown parking and sell out hotel rooms that would otherwise be wide open.
Every event below gets a Lowdown Verdict answering the question that actually matters: is this worth planning your trip around, or is it just something happening while you're in town? We've written every event using its typical recurring pattern — "late February," "second weekend of October" — instead of a specific date, because specific dates go stale the moment a calendar page publishes them. See "How to confirm dates before you book" further down for how to nail down the exact weekend once you're ready to book. For the broader month-by-month weather and crowd picture that sits underneath this events layer, see our best time to visit Sedona guide.
Winter (December–February)
Winter opens quiet with a single holiday evening at Tlaquepaque, then closes out with back-to-back running and film events in early-to-late February — the two biggest lodging-pressure dates of the entire first quarter.
Festival of Lights at Tlaquepaque
The Festival of Lights is Tlaquepaque Arts & Village's signature holiday evening, held one Saturday in early-to-mid December, when the shopping village lights roughly 6,000 luminarias at dusk along with holiday music, a Santa visit for kids, and free hot cider. Tlaquepaque also hosts a separate menorah lighting for Hanukkah during the same holiday season. It's a long-running local tradition rather than a tourist-marketed festival, and it's free to attend.
Lowdown Verdict: A nice add-on if you're already in Sedona in December, not a reason to time a whole trip around. It's a single evening, and it won't meaningfully move hotel rates the way the winter's two other events do.
RunSedona (Sedona Marathon, 10K, 5K & Walk)
RunSedona is an established race weekend held annually in early February, with a half marathon, 10K, 5K, and a family-friendly 5K walk that route through red rock scenery and Sedona's streets. It's built a real reputation among destination-race runners, and it draws a race-day expo with local food and vendors on top of the courses themselves.
Lowdown Verdict: Plan around it if you're running one of the distances — it's a legitimately well-regarded race in a spectacular setting. If you're not running, expect tighter parking near the course and book lodging early; it's a smaller footprint than the Film Festival but it does move room availability.
Sedona International Film Festival
The Sedona International Film Festival is the flagship event on this entire calendar. Held annually in the last week of February, typically running into the first day or two of March, it's a nine-day showcase of roughly 150 narrative features, documentaries, and short films screened across three venues: the Mary D. Fisher Theatre, Harkins, and the Sedona Performing Arts Center. For an event this size, it's a genuinely well-regarded festival within the independent film circuit, not a small local screening series.
Lowdown Verdict: Plan around it if independent film is part of why you travel — this is the one weeklong stretch on this calendar worth building an entire Sedona trip on its own. If you're not here for the films, it's still a fine week to visit, but book lodging early since festival attendees fill Uptown-adjacent hotels across all nine days.
Booking for Film Festival or RunSedona Week
Late February is one of the tightest lodging stretches of the year in Sedona — the Film Festival's nine days overlap with some of the same properties RunSedona fills a few weeks earlier. If either date falls inside a trip you're already planning, lock in a room now rather than waiting for the current year's exact dates to be announced. Our neighborhood guide breaks down which Sedona base makes sense if you want to walk to festival venues.
Spring (March–May)
Spring is the quiet stretch of this calendar — there's no marquee named festival here the way there is in winter and fall, and that's worth knowing rather than treating as a gap in our research.
The Shoulder Season Without a Headline Event
March through May is widely considered one of Sedona's best hiking windows — mild temperatures, wildflowers on the lower trails, and good conditions across every difficulty level. It's a natural draw rather than a scheduled one: nothing on the calendar forces your dates the way the Film Festival or the Arts Festival does, which makes spring a good target if you'd rather build your own itinerary than plan around someone else's event weekend.
Lowdown Verdict: Not a reason to avoid or chase specific dates — it's the season on this calendar where the weather itself is doing the work, not a festival. See our best time to visit guide for the fuller month-by-month breakdown of what spring actually feels like on the ground.
Summer (June–August)
Summer is the thinnest season on this event calendar, and unlike spring, that's not just a matter of nothing being scheduled — it's partly a matter of fire risk in a red-rock canyon town surrounded by national forest land.
Fourth of July: No Fireworks, and That's Permanent
Sedona's city ordinance bars public fireworks displays within city limits and permits consumer fireworks only on private property, with the owner's consent, during narrow windows around July 4 and New Year's, so there's no public show to plan a trip around. The surrounding Coconino National Forest land is also frequently placed under additional seasonal fire restrictions through the hottest, driest stretch of summer. This isn't a one-year policy or a pandemic-era holdover — it's a permanent rule driven by the very real fire risk of a canyon town ringed by dry forest and red rock. If a Fourth of July fireworks show is part of your trip plan, Sedona is not the destination for it.
Lowdown Verdict: Don't build a Fourth of July trip around fireworks here — there aren't any, by design. It's still a fine, if hot, holiday to visit for hiking early and dining out, just not for a pyrotechnics show.
Monsoon Season Overlaps the Whole Summer
Arizona's monsoon season runs from mid-June through the end of September, bringing afternoon thunderstorms, flash flood risk in Oak Creek and the slot canyons, and lightning exposure on trails like Cathedral Rock and Bell Rock. It's part of why summer stays light on scheduled outdoor festivals — afternoon storms are unpredictable enough that most organizers plan around them rather than through them. See our Sedona monsoon season guide for the safety details and why some photographers consider it the most dramatic season of the year despite the risk.
Lowdown Verdict: Not a reason to skip summer, but a real reason to plan hikes for the morning and keep an afternoon weather eye on the forecast every day you're here.
Fall (September–November)
Fall is Sedona's busiest events month by far. Two named arts festivals land in the same few weeks that Oak Creek Canyon's fall color typically peaks — which makes October the single most crowded month on this calendar, and also, for a lot of visitors, the best one.
Sedona Arts Festival
The Sedona Arts Festival is a two-day juried fine arts show held annually on a weekend in October at Sedona Red Rock High School in West Sedona, typically the second weekend of the month. It draws over 100 artists from across the country, plus live music, food, and a beer and wine garden. It's the sole fundraiser for arts education in the Sedona area, and it's been running for more than three decades.
Lowdown Verdict: Worth planning around if you want a real fine-art shopping day with a festival atmosphere; a pleasant surprise to stumble into otherwise. General admission runs a modest per-person rate for a two-day pass, with kids free.
Sedona Plein Air Festival
The Sedona Plein Air Festival, run by the Sedona Arts Center, is a multi-day event in October where master artists paint on location throughout Sedona and the Verde Valley, capturing the red rock landscape in real time. It's one of the oldest continuously running plein air festivals in the western United States, and the week includes artist demonstrations, workshops, and exhibitions of the finished work that are open to the public.
Lowdown Verdict: A genuinely distinctive Sedona experience if you're into watching working artists rather than just browsing a finished-art show — different enough from the Arts Festival that it's worth checking both October dates before you book, since they don't always land on the same weekend.
Fall Color in Oak Creek Canyon
Fall color isn't a scheduled event — it's a natural draw, and it belongs on this calendar anyway because it moves crowds and traffic on AZ-89A the same way a festival would. Oak Creek Canyon's maples, cottonwoods, and sycamores typically peak somewhere between the third week of October and the first week of November, with mid-to-late October the most reliable window most years. West Fork Trail and Slide Rock State Park are the two most photographed spots for it, and both see meaningfully heavier traffic and fuller parking lots during peak color than the rest of the year — though as of this writing West Fork Trail #108 is closed under a 2026 Coconino National Forest closure order following the Pocket Fire, so confirm current status before planning a fall-color trip around it. Our Sedona photography guide covers the specific light and timing details for shooting it.
Lowdown Verdict: Worth timing a trip around if fall color specifically is the draw, but hold your dates loosely — unlike the festivals on this page, color timing shifts with that year's rainfall and temperatures, not a fixed calendar.
Event Weekends: Lodging
Four stretches on this calendar reliably change the math on where you'll sleep: RunSedona weekend and the Film Festival's nine days in February, and the Arts Festival and Plein Air Festival weekends in October — the second of which often overlaps directly with peak fall color traffic. On any of these dates, Uptown-adjacent and West Sedona properties book up well ahead of time, and rates climb accordingly.
The practical takeaway: if your trip overlaps with one of these four windows, book lodging as early as possible, and budget more than you might for an ordinary week. If you're weighing which part of town makes sense for easy access to festival venues versus a quieter home base, our where to stay guide breaks down Uptown, West Sedona, and the Village of Oak Creek. Our trip cost breakdown also shows how much event-weekend rates can move the total price of a trip compared to a slower week.
Booking Around an Event Weekend
Whether you're chasing one of these dates or deliberately avoiding it, lock in lodging as early as you can — rates and availability move fastest on the weekends this page flags.
How to Confirm Dates Before You Book
Every event on this page is described by its typical recurring window — "late February," "second weekend of October" — rather than a specific calendar date, and that's deliberate. Search results and AI summaries for event dates go stale fast, often carrying a prior year's dates forward long after they've changed. Do not book non-refundable travel around a specific date you found anywhere, including this page, without confirming it on the event's own official website first.
For the Film Festival, check the Sedona International Film Festival's official site. For RunSedona, check the official RunSedona event page. For the Arts Festival and Plein Air Festival, check the Sedona Arts Festival and Sedona Arts Center sites respectively. For fall color, there's no organizer to check — watch current-year foliage reports in October instead of relying on any fixed date. This page is built to describe how Sedona's event season typically unfolds, not to promise a specific weekend.