Long Canyon Trail: The Boynton Canyon You'll Have to Yourself

By The Lowdown Guide Editorial Team · Visited April 2026 · Updated April 2026

Long Canyon vs. Boynton Canyon: The Honest Comparison

Boynton Canyon is a legitimately great hike. It is also, on most weekend mornings from March through October, a legitimately crowded hike. The Enchantment Resort sits at the trailhead. Shuttle vans park in the lot. Tour groups with matching hats form queues at the trailhead signboard. The canyon itself is stunning enough that most people tolerate the circus — but the experience suffers.

Long Canyon runs parallel to Boynton Canyon, roughly a mile to the south, penetrating the same red rock formation from the same general direction. The geology is the same. The canyon character — enclosed walls, sandy wash floor, dramatic color layering on the rock faces — is the same. What is different is the crowd level. On the Saturday morning we hiked Long Canyon in April 2026, we passed four other parties in 6 miles. At Boynton Canyon that same morning, the parking lot had a waiting line.

The trade-off is distance: Long Canyon is 6.4 miles round trip to the official terminus versus Boynton Canyon's roughly 6 miles to the vortex area. That small difference in mileage, combined with the harder-to-find trailhead and the absence of a resort anchor, accounts for almost all of the crowd differential. Long Canyon is not objectively better than Boynton Canyon — it is different, and quieter, which for many hikers makes it better in practice.

Finding the Trailhead (This Is the Hard Part)

The Long Canyon trailhead is the single biggest logistical challenge of this hike, and it has a real chance of defeating you before you start. The parking is a wide gravel pullout on Long Canyon Road — not a developed lot, not a signed trailhead, just a widened section of road where people stop. Navigation apps sometimes point to the wrong location or to an entrance that requires passing through a private development. GPS-mark the coordinates before you leave Sedona.

Long Canyon Road turns off Boynton Pass Road on the left (west) side when driving northwest. The road surface is unpaved but passable in a standard vehicle under normal conditions. Drive approximately 0.8 miles from the Boynton Pass Road turnoff. The pullout is on the right side of the road and holds roughly 12 vehicles — it is obvious once you are looking for it, but easy to overshoot if you are checking your phone. There is no trailhead signage visible from the direction of approach. A wooden post marker is visible from the pullout itself.

Display a Red Rock Pass on your dashboard. Unlike the Boynton Canyon lot, which has a ranger presence, the Long Canyon pullout is primarily self-policed — but rangers do patrol the area and ticket routinely. The pullout does not fill on most weekends before 10 AM, which is a meaningful advantage over every other trailhead in the Boynton Pass corridor.

Trail Breakdown: Mile by Mile

The Unofficial Extension: What's Past Mile 3.2

The official Long Canyon Trail ends at approximately 3.2 miles. Most maps, trail apps, and guide posts treat this as the destination. It is not. The canyon continues past the official terminus and an unofficial use-trail follows the wash for approximately another 0.8 miles to the canyon box, where the walls converge and further progress requires technical climbing.

The first 0.3 miles of the extension is easy going on the wash floor with intermittent use-trail. The final 0.5 miles requires careful attention to route-finding across boulders — some are large enough that you will need to think about your line, but nothing requires more than a step-up or a hand for balance. The challenge is navigation, not athleticism. The wash bottom is your primary guide. Stay in or near the wash; do not attempt to go high on the canyon walls.

The canyon box itself is the payoff: walls converging overhead, complete enclosure, total silence except for your breath. We saw no other hikers in this section. The contrast with the Boynton Canyon vortex area — where you are sharing the experience with groups of 20 — is complete. GPS-track your route in the extension section so you can navigate back confidently; the boulder field can look different in the return direction.