Bell Rock Vortex
Coconino National Forest, Arizona
A bell-shaped red butte on Sedona's southern approach, classed as one of the four original vortex sites and reached by the most accessible trail of the bunch.
Bell Rock is the butte that announces Sedona: a rounded red formation beside Highway 179 between the village of Oak Creek and the town, fenced by an easy, mostly paved pathway that the Forest Service rates family-friendly and that serves as the front door to the southern Red Rock trail system. Trail No. 96 runs 3.5 miles one way past Bell Rock, Baby Bell, and Courthouse Butte, and most of it is hard-surfaced enough for casual walkers, which makes Bell Rock the vortex site that visitors of every ability level reach.
Its reputation as the most "active" of the Sedona vortex sites comes straight out of the modern vortex literature rather than any older tradition: the vortex idea begins with Page Bryant around 1980, and Bell Rock was folded into the four classic sites early, with its easily climbed base and open energy field becoming standard claims of the tour guides who followed. What the site actually is, is a red butte on Yavapai-Apache ancestral land inside a national forest, wrapped by a busy trail with a $5 parking pass. The honest version of Bell Rock is that the energy is a modern story laid over a very old landscape, and both layers are visible in the same view.
Visiting
The Forest Service's Bell Rock Pathway page carries the trail details; parking at Bell Rock Vista or Courthouse Vista requires the Red Rock Pass or an America the Beautiful pass.
Photo: Tomas Castelazo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bell_Rock_in_Sedona_Arizona.jpg))
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories