Glen Canyon & Lake Powell

We spent a warm and sunny first week of April at Lone Rock Beach on Lake Powell, a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River created by the Glen Canyon Dam, that straddles the Arizona/Utah border. This sprawling lake and land to the north are part of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The land south belongs to the Navajo Nation.

I’m happy to report that we never got stuck. However, we watched other people get stuck multiple times every day and that was equally entertaining and horrifying.

During his explorations, John Wesley Powell named Glen Canyon for the now legendary glens, grottoes, and sandstone formations he saw carved into this rugged landscape by the Colorado River. After years of being drowned under Lake Powell, water levels are receding, and some of the features of Glen Canyon are beginning to reemerge.

Of course, the best way to experience this area is by boat which we neither own nor rented. There are not many roads accessing this area and the ones that do often require high clearance, 4WD, and a desire to destroy your suspension. Rainbow Bridge National Monument is here and only accessible by boat or backpacking. It would be cool to see as it’s the largest natural bridge in the world!

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Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam are controversial. Most of the arid Western US does not get enough rainfall to support its population nor economic development. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the US Government created the Bureau of Reclamation to address the increasing water needs of the west. The Bureau began constructing complex dam systems along many rivers in the west, notably the Colorado River that the states had been struggling to allocate. These dams controlled flooding and also provided cheap water and hydroelectric power to millions of people. After environmentalists won the battle to not build a dam in the area of Dinosaur National Monument, Glen Canyon was not so lucky.

And so the Glen Canyon Dam was constructed 15 miles upstream of Lee’s Ferry and the floodgates closed in 1963. It took 17 years for Lake Powell to fill, to almost 200 miles upstream from the dam. Even though cheap water and power are definitely appreciated, it hasn’t come without cost. Native Peoples have lost sacred sites, conservationists call Glen Canyon the “Lost National Park”, and it has undeniably affected the landscape and ecosystem around the lake and its close downstream neighbor, the Grand Canyon.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Lake Powell in coming years as it is quickly filling with sand and more water is being taken out than replaced.

The Visitor Center and tours were closed due to COVID-19 so we only walked around the outside.

The closest town to Lake Powell is Page, AZ. Page is solidly on the tourist circuit of S Utah/N Arizona with Horseshoe Bend and Antelope Canyon. It also has a really nice multi-use 10-mile trail around the edges of the town that we biked.

Antelope Canyon, probably the most famous slot canyon of all, happens to be located near Lake Powell. It is on Navajo land and you can only visit it on a pricey guided tour. Since Navajo Tribal Parks were still closed due to COVID-19, we found another fabulous (even more fabulous?) slot to hike. In nearby Paria Canyon – Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness, we hiked the Wire Pass slot canyon and to the confluence of Buckskin Gulch, where you can go left or right through the longest and deepest slot canyon in the southwest. We went right for a couple of miles and then back. Buckskin Gulch has 15 miles of narrows and continues on through Paria Canyon for extremely advanced backpackers. It’s known as one of the most dangerous backpacking trips you can take because of the risks of flash flooding from rain as far away as Bryce. I would definitely put this hike in the top 5 that we’ve ever done.

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Next, we continue exploring the canyon country of southwest Utah.