Lake Powell

Pool and Lake Powell at Page AZ

We were overnight in Page, AZ and toured out to the Rainbow Bridge in Forbidding Canyon on Lake Powell today.

Click on the image for a photo album.

We got up in the morning and went to Bubba's Texas style BBQ for breakfast (it really isn't Texas style, nor is it BBQ). We did some laundry, bought our tickets for the cruise on Lake Powell to the Rainbow Bridge (from 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. $50), and went back to the hotel to level out a bit. We decided to stay one more night and drive to Monument Valley in the morning of the next day. Especially since we would not be done the cruise until late in the day.

Cindy met a woman in the laundromat from Seattle who had lived in Minnesota and Phoenix — she said the former was too cold the later was too hot. She also said the reason they don't have daylight savings time in Arizona is because no one would want to cut their lawn at 11:00 p.m. at night! 

We did the laundry in downtown Page and shopped in the Safeway for our essentials.  An Indian panhandled $5 from Kate on some pretense of getting to Las Vegas — Kate was feeling generous. Suppose you arrived in Las Vegas with a $5 grub state; do you really think you could build anything on that? Kate sure can't! That evening, at the same mall we had been in the morning, we were hit up by the same Indian — now he tells us he's trying to get to Austin Nevada. This time we said no. 

The afternoon boat cruise on the Canyon Odyssey leaves from Wahweap Marina. There's a hotel there, with a pool and the scenery is weird. It's a whole other country, very odd to have all this water in this arid dry canyon land.

It's 2:00 p.m. and we're currently on the cruise on Lake Powell. It's good that we brought our own supplies as we're heading into "Utah/Morgan" territory and shipboard sustenance is limited to water, lemonade and coffee. Huh? No beer? While Page is in AZ much of Lake Powell is in Utah. The Rainbow Arch is in Arizona but there's no beer there!

Our boat ride was scenic and lots of fun but there's way too much sun. The lake is down some 80 ft from the high water mark of 1983 and there's a white "bath tub ring" left on the canyon walls.. They had too much water then and had to release the excess long, i.e. they couldn't control the river. You can see the high water mark along the shoreline landscape as a white mark on the buttes and canyon walls.

The dam is comparable to the Hoover dam — it's over 700 feet tall, closer to 800 feet and completed in 1963. Once built it took 17 years to fill! The lake is narrower than Lake Mead with much more dramatic landscapes — buttes, narrow canyons, etc.  Our tour goes 40 miles up the lake to the famous Rainbow Arch and there's lots of stunning landscape along the way. The Rainbow Arch is an impressive natural stone arch about 300 ft wide at the base. We have to hike about one mile after navigating a narrow Canyon for about 6 miles from the main body of the Colorado river. When the water was higher the boat went right up to the arch.

By the way it turns out that we could have taken an early morning tour if anyone had let us know; and we had tried to find out!

The important story for the book is how we arrived back at the end of the cruise on Lake Powell. We're exhausted, sun burnt, ready for a car ride back to our hotel, and aren't you glad we decided to stay rather than travel? Only to discover that Reg no longer has any car keys and we have only one set. Cindy leads us step by step through our last contact with them and then points out to us that they are laying in plain view in the backseat! Reg is relieved that it was Kate who had left them this time as this has happened before to him (c.f. Davenport, KY and the Dicks).

The security fellow at the lodge where we had taken the tour has a complete kit for breaking into cars. He tells us he drove a tow truck in Phoenix and this kit was the second best $40 he'd ever spent. He also tells us that he does this about 3 to 4 times a week. In any case, he gets into the car with a minimum of fuss as Kate had left her window open a bit. We tip $5 and are very relieved that the experience wasn't worse. The lesson here is to get two sets of keys when you rent.

We went to our pool back at the Inn on Lake Powell after the long tour to cool down after a day in the sun. Although the day had been very hot and sunny the pool was cold, very cold! Next morning they admitted, only when we mentioned it, that "We usually warn our guests that the pool isn't heated."

These notes, originally composed by Kate, Cindy and Reg at the time of the trip, were transcribed '21/07/06 with the help of Google voice recognition.