A Winter Visit to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area covers all of Lake Powell and is massive. One of the main attractions of Lake Powell is boating and if you were visiting in the summer, you likely would be looking at houseboat rentals and which bays you want to explore or booking a tour to Rainbow Bridge NM, but in November most things are shut down for the winter. And also in November 2021, due to drought, the water level was the lowest it has been since the lake was originally created and many of the marinas were closed.
Despite being shut down for the winter, there are still some things to see and do.
We started at Lee’s Ferry, which is where many rafting trips into The Grand Canyon begin. It turns out the area right by the Colorado River is actually part of Grand Canyon National Park.
At Lee’s Ferry, there are several different hiking opportunities, we decided to take the short walk to the Lonely Dell Ranch Historic Site to check out the historic buildings and orchard, which even has fruit to pick in the right season (not November).
After Lee’s Ferry, we headed to Navajo Bridge, which had a small visitor’s center (that was actually open) and a chance to walk across the old bridge that crosses the Colorado River.
About 35 miles north of Navajo Bridge is the famous Horseshoe Bend. This is where we found all the people, up until this point, most of the places we stopped were pretty empty. The parking lot was huge and although not close to full when we were there, there were plenty of people. There is a fee to enter and then about a 1.5 mile round trip walk on a well maintained wide path to the overlook. It is downhill on the way there and uphill on the way back and would be hot in the summer.
After that we continued towards Page and decided to go to see the lake, so we drove to Antelope Point and found the longest unusable boat ramp I’ve ever seen.
The last stop of our day was the Lake Powell Dam, which is the dam that created Lake Powell when it was built in the 1950’s. And then for dinner we had very acceptable BBQ at Big Johns Texas BBQ.
The next morning we had breakfast crepes from Canyon Crepes Cafe and did some hiking on the Rim Trail and then we crawled around on the rocks at The Chains and managed to find our way down to the water level.
