Lake Powell and Glen Canyon

Here's our new home, for a couple of weeks: Wahweap campground on Lake Powell near Page, Arizona.

View of Lake Powell from our campsite.

It is situated right on Lake Powell. The area is high desert and rock mountains, mesas and canyons. Most of the Glen Canyon was turned into Lake Powell by damming the Colorado River in 1957.

Glen Canyon Dam and Bridge

Yesterday we took a raft trip down the 15 miles left of Glen Canyon, from Page to Lees Ferry, where the Grand Canyon begins.

A perfectly still moment on the Colorado River, in Glen Canyon.

The raft trip took about 3-4 hours. It was a peaceful ride - no white water. The temperature was perfect, warm in the sun and cool in the shade. In the summer we hear it can be brutally hot. The scenery was spectacular. The Navajo and Kayenta sandstone cliffs range from 500 to 1000 feet on both sides.  Our little raft was really dwarfed. In the next photo the tiny dot that you can barely see on the river in the distance is a 20 person raft like ours at the end of a 2 mile straight stretch.

You really begin to lose perspective of how huge the canyon is after drifting for a few hours. This moment was a reminder.

 

The rock itself is fascinating. Rick and I are going to take a geology course on DVD so we can understand more
about what we are seeing. The southwest is so much about rocks.


We will be exploring Lake Powell as much as we can while we're here. We've already kayaked and explored the shore lines nearby.  We'll barely scratch the surface as the lake is 254 square miles. The shore length is 1,900 miles, with all the convolutions from the canyons. People rent houseboats here and spend days, weeks, exploring the lake.

Kayaking on Lake Powell

But we'll do what we can.







P.S. I changed the look of the blog in honor of the season, and the aesthetics of the southwest.