Day 71 - Glen Canyon National Recreation Area & Lake Powell, UT

We left Capitol Reef National Park and we went from a landscape of lush greenery with a beautiful red rock background, back to a desert landscape of rocks, mountains and petrified sand dunes. Even though it's a place which looks like it contains little life and somewhere you wouldn't want to be stuck in for too long, it is beautiful with so many different colours in the rocks, each coming from different points in time and related to a different event in the geological history. I was never very interested in Geography but you can't help but want to understand more about the rocks and how such an awesome landscape is created. Maybe this is why we have enjoyed the visitor centers at the National Parks so much.

Today we were headed for Glen Canyon which contains Lake Powell. This lake is huge, so big that we're actually visiting it twice.

Glen Canyon is a National Recreation Area so its managed by the National Parks Service. This meant we got to enter it for free with our National Parks pass.

In 1956, the Colorado Storage Project agreed to dam the Colorado River and create huge reservoirs to support life in Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and California. One of these huge reservoirs was formed in Glen Canyon which became known as Lake Powell. It is sad to think of the magnificent canyon which is now underneath the lake, the lost historical sites which were flooded and in some cases, destroyed and the plants and animals which used to live in the canyon, many of which are now struggling to survive. But before the dams and the reservoirs, the Colorado River was unpredictable; sometimes there would be too little water and sometimes too much. Without Lake Powell and other lakes like it, there would be little life in these 5 big states. 

We stayed in Bullfrog, an area on the North side of Lake Powell with a marina, hotel, shop, restaurant and a campsite. We had originally booked to stay in the RV park, only because you could reserve this in advance and we didn't want to miss out on somewhere to camp for the night. When we arrived, the lady at check in asked if we wanted to move to the more shaded campground which was half the price. We agreed, grabbed our refund and headed over to the campsite. It was empty, we needn't had worried! After driving around every single campsite, we finally found one with a little shade and set up camp for the night.

With the tent pitched, we headed off to the restaurant for some food. It was 1pm and there were a few people in the restaurant. When we went to order we were told 'sorry, there is no chicken, rice, cheese or beans, you can only order meals which don't include these ingredients'. We were flabbergasted, what sort of restaurant doesn't have chicken, rice, cheese and beans!! But, we didn't have any other choice, there was no other restaurant for miles around so we checked all the ingredients from the menu and managed to find something that met the criteria, Meatloaf Sandwich. The food wasn't great and if it wasn't for the fact that we were hungry and without other options, we wouldn't have eaten there but sometimes you have little choice.

After lunch, we decided to explore the lake! We hired a couple of kayaks and headed out for 2 hours. It was a huge amount of fun. We aimed to reach the other side of the lake where there was a gap in the canyon we wanted to explore. It looked a lot closer than it really was and after an hour of hard paddling, we finally reached the other side. We then had to paddle back with very heavy arms!

Normally large bodies of water result in an area that is cooler with a sea breeze, a wind coming off the water or at a higher elevation where the temperature drops but at Lake Powell, this place is not supposed to be a lake, it is a canyon in the middle of a desert. It is hot, all day and all night! We hadn't really thought of this when we went out on the lake. We hadn't taken enough water and we had chosen to go out at the hottest park of the day, 3pm. This made the trip really tough and we were thankful when we were both back on dry land and able to buy very large energy drinks.

We were surprised at how many houseboats there were on the lake. Not many of them looked like permanent houseboats but holiday homes you can hire for a few days or a few weeks. Each had a slide off the back of them, a deck with a BBQ and seating area and what looked like 2-3 bedrooms. There were plenty of facilities for these boats too on the lake including dump stations, stores, gas stations and lots and lots of places to moor up for the night. Maybe something to do in a future trip.

Our night in the tent at Lake Powell was really quiet and relaxing to start with, we were camping on sand with no big groups of noisy people around in the middle of nowhere. Then a car pulling a huge boat turned up, it must have arrived too late to get into the water so the family decided to camp in the boat in the campsite but the boat was big and it hit a tree so at 11pm we had the sound of a poor man surveying his broken boat with his over excited kids only making the matter worse. Luckily they were gone early in the morning otherwise we might have had to gloat at the misfortune as they kept us awake for so long.