An Ode to Lake Powell

Now that I have lived on the East coast for the past 3.5 years or so I'm better able to step back from a lot of the things I used to do/eat/not do/not eat/etc and reassess how cool/uncool they are/were.

Lake Powell is one thing that I can clearly categorize as cool.  Not that I didn't already know that, but that classification has been solidified now that I juxtapose it with some of the dinky and crowded lakes and parks on this side of the country.

They just don't look like this in the East

Some of the landscapes and mountains out West are majestic, expansive, and awe-inspiring in a way that other parts of the world simply are not.  After we landed in PHX, the next morning we made the 4- to 5-hr drive to the lake to launch the houseboat and ski boat.  We happened to have checked out a book on CD from the library and the book was 'No Country For Old Men'.  It turned out to be perfect material for my drive across the desert.  As the narrator painted a picture of the scene with words like bajada and caldera and brush I didn't have to use my imagination much to envision it--I was already there.  It became very apparent to me why you have authors like McCarthy and Stegner who were so inspired by the scenery that they incorporated it heavily into their writing.

Even the drive up there is nice

The basic outline of these trips is we get a houseboat and we drive it up the lake 20 miles or so and scout out a nice beach where we can tie down anchors.  Then you stay put for a week or so and you take out your ski boat several times a day for waterskiing, wakeboarding, wake surfing, tubing.  You also take a trip or two up the lake to explore the canyons, swim, cliff dive, fill up on gas.  Back at the houseboat you do your meals and you can watch movies, play guitar, canoe, have dance parties, etc.  If you don't have fun then there's something wrong with you.

Our camp at dusk

Here are some fun factoids about the lake:

• Lake Powell has over 2,000 miles of shoreline which is more than the combined states on the Pacific Coast. It is 400 feet deep, 186 miles long and has a water storage capacity of 27,000,000 acre feet of water.
• Over 3,000,000 people visit Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon National Recreation area every year. The average length of stay of 4.5 days is the longest stay of any federal park.
• Lake Powell was formed when the Glen Canyon Dam was completed on the Colorado River in 1963. Lake Powell took 17 years to reach "full pool" in 1980.
• Glen Canyon Dam provides essential water storage and electric power to small rural electric co-ops, Native American reservations and towns throughout Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.  The power plant has eight generators with a combined capacity of close to 1.3 million kilowatts.
• Lake Powell was named in honor of Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell who led an expedition in wooden boats down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869.
• Rainbow Bridge, the largest natural bridge on earth, is the most famous site on Lake Powell.