Boynton Canyon Vortex
Sedona, Arizona, United States
A red-rock canyon northwest of Sedona where a Forest Service trail passes through one of the four vortex sites that made the town America's New Age capital.
Boynton Canyon is a boxed red-rock canyon that the Forest Service manages as ordinary, if spectacular, hiking, and that New Age tradition, dating to the nineteen-eighties' channeled writings that founded Sedona's vortex legend, ranks among the town's four signature energy sites. At the canyon's mouth sits a luxury resort; beyond it the trail climbs into wilderness toward the spires including the balancing formation popularly called Kachina Woman.
The canyon also carries real weight for the Yavapai people, whose oral tradition places creation stories here. That dual identity, Indigenous sacred geography and energy-tourism landmark at once, is the honest frame: the vortex is a modern American invention, and the canyon's sacredness to the Yavapai is not.
Visiting
The Forest Service's trail page carries current conditions; a Red Rock Pass ($5 daily) is required to park at the trailhead, and the lot fills by mid-morning.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Boynton_Canyon), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories