July 5th - Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona

Our last big thing before visiting my brother in Albuquerque was to visit Lake Powell, which we had never seen before. This was supposed to be a good year to see the scenery due to the 5-year drought in the area that lowered the level of the lake and exposed more of the rock formations on its shoreline. When we rolled up the tent while we were packing, Monika spotted two small burrows in the gravel where the tent had stood. We had both heard scritching and scratching in the pre-dawn for the last two days, but I thought it was some critter snuffling around the tent like a porcupine, skunk, or armadillo. But as it turned out the critter was making a burrow right underneath our tent floor. We still don’t know what critter it was, but unless someone else put their tent on that spot it would have to cope with an exposed burrow from now on.

As we drove out we paused to let a young male and female mule deer cross the road in front of us. They were headed for the campground area, perhaps for water, and I must say they were most polite about waiting for me to stop completely before leisurely crossing the road right in front of us—graceful animals. We drove southwest to the “4 corners” region where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico all meet, but declined the opportunity to visit the exact point because the Navajo have started charging $3 a head to visit it, and it just wasn’t worth it to us.

From the 4 corners we continued west-southwest into Arizona and then curved back to the Glen Canyon dam near the Utah-Arizona border. The vegetation faded into really stunted sagebrush and finally to what I would call pure desert, but then it gradually increased again to the point where we started to see some small juniper trees along with the sagebrush beside the road. The desert part of the drive reminded me of the Painted Desert area that lies to the south—the broad horizontal bands of red, orange, or white rocks and earth were quite vivid.

We also saw a plethora of fantastically shaped rocks along the way. These formations are so weird that you can play the same game you would with puffy cloud formations and try to make up names to suit the shapes. Monika was a clear winner with the name “water bottle” for one formation that bulged out around the bottom and had a perfectly flat cap on top. She also saw a dragon complete with ears, long snout, and a long tail in another formation. My best attempt was to make out a steam locomotive in the form of one mesa, but that was a clear also-ran in the naming competition.

Lake Powell appeared in the distance long before we drove across the Glen Canyon dam, and I once again found the sight of so much blue water in a completely arid, red-rock environment to be somehow jarring—beautiful but somehow unexpected or contradictory. After crossing the bridge beside the dam to get to the National Recreation Area on the other side, we stopped at the lodge to inquire about boat tours of the lake. After a bit of hemming and hawing over the prices (no competition here, it’s take it or leave it), we signed up for the 7-hour, no lunch tour the next day that went to the Rainbow Bridge natural arch. Altho the nearby campground looked nice and even had some trees and shade, we decided to find a motel room for the night. It was in the 90s that afternoon and we both felt it was just too hot to camp in a tent. So we drove back to Page, Arizona, on the other side of the dam to find a place for the night, and that turned out to not be a problem as long as you didn’t mind paying “resort” prices.

In Page we finally broke down, bit the bullet and got a room in a nice motel. After registering, taking a shower, and indulging in a 2-hour nap, we had enough energy to drive back to the Visitor Center right beside the dam. We were too late for the last tour, which had started at 4:00, but we signed up for a tour the next afternoon and looked at all the exhibits. The place is run by the Bureau of Reclamation and the exhibits were mostly of the “aren’t we wonderful” variety, but interesting nonetheless. We found out there are rafting tours that start from the dam and go downstream into what is left of Glen Canyon, as well as other boat tours on the upstream section of Lake Powell that visit Rainbow Bridge from the north or east.