Places to stay in Clarkdale

Clarkdale Lodge, 23 North 11th Street, rents studios and suites, which usually means a kitchen and space to spread out rather than a hotel room.

Taawaki Inn, 441 South Broadway Street, is the newer one, and it belongs to the Verde Canyon Railroad. The depot the trains leave from is minutes away, which makes it the obvious answer if the railroad is the reason you are coming.

Why stay in Clarkdale at all

Most people passing through the valley stay in Sedona and pay Sedona prices, or in Cottonwood because it is central. Clarkdale is the quiet third option, and it has a specific case.

It is five minutes from Tuzigoot National Monument and about ten from Old Town Cottonwood and its tasting rooms. It is fifteen minutes from Jerome, up the switchbacks. The Verde Canyon Railroad leaves from here, a three-and-a-half to four-hour run into country with no road access, and that is a trip you do not want to be driving an hour to catch in the morning.

And it is genuinely quiet. Clarkdale was built as a company town in 1912 to serve the smelter, laid out deliberately with a park and a broad main street, and it has stayed small. Two bars facing each other on Main Street is the whole nightlife, which for some people is the point.

Booking notes

Both are small, which means limited rooms and no slack at busy times. October, with the valley’s festival weekends, and the spring are when this fills.

If neither has space, Cottonwood is ten minutes away with considerably more choice, and Camp Verde is twenty-five with the interstate chains. The Cottonwood things to do guide covers the middle of the valley.