Chapel of the Holy Cross

Chapel of the Holy Cross tickets: which one to buy

The chapel is four miles south of Sedona, off the main highway, and entry is free with a donation box inside. The practical problem is parking: the lot is small, it sits at the top of a steep access road, and in season it fills by mid-morning with attendants turning cars away. Arrive early, or take one of the trolley tours from town that include the chapel on a loop with the main viewpoints, which solves the problem entirely.

Jeep tours of the red rock country pass nearby and some stop here. If you are driving yourself, combine it with Bell Rock and the Courthouse Butte trailhead a few minutes further south, since they share the same road. The chapel holds a prayer service one evening a week rather than a full mass schedule, and visitors are welcome at it. Photography is allowed outside but discouraged during services. The road up is steep enough that cyclists should plan to walk the last stretch.

Visiting Chapel of the Holy Cross: what to see

Marguerite Brunswig Staude, a rancher and sculptor, saw the Empire State Building under construction in 1932 and decided that a church could be built on the same structural logic. An attempt to do it in Budapest was abandoned when war broke out, and she brought the idea home to Arizona instead. The chapel was built between 1954 and 1956 on national forest land, a special permit having been obtained with the help of a local senator, to a design by August Strotz of the firm Anshen and Allen.

It is a plain concrete wedge driven between two red sandstone spurs, with a cross some ninety feet high built into the glass wall facing out. The interior is small, dim and deliberately undecorated, with the view through the glass doing the work that stained glass would do elsewhere. It was added to the national register of historic places in 2011. The altar is a plain block of stone and the only ornament is a metal corpus hung against the glass.

Chapel of the Holy Cross opening hours and the best time to go

Late afternoon is the classic time, when the low sun turns the surrounding buttes deep red and the chapel is lit from the front; sunrise is quieter and the light is colder. Midday in summer is hot, crowded and flat, and the walk up the ramp from the lot is exposed. Sedona gets very busy on spring weekends and through the autumn colour season in October, and the town has introduced shuttle services for the busiest trailheads to control it.

Winter brings occasional snow on the red rock, which is the most striking version of the place and the least crowded. The chapel closes in the early evening. Allow twenty minutes inside and as long again on the terrace, which is the real viewpoint. Bring water; there is no cafe, only a small shop in the lower level. The lower level holds a gift shop and a small candle room, which is the one sheltered spot on the site.