Travel Guide Glen Canyon National Recreation Area

It was during his 1869 expedition on the Colorado River that explorer John Wesley Powell named the area Glen Canyon - a "glen" being a narrow, incised valley. The National Recreation Area was created in 1972 by the US Congress. Three quarters of its 5,058 km2 are in Utah, the rest in northern Arizona.The centerpiece of the site, Lake Powell, accounts for just 13%. Nevertheless, it is the second largest man-made lake in North America, created in 1963 with the construction of Glen Canyon Dam. Its creation was prompted by a desire to supply electricity to part of the south-western United States - as a complement to the coal-fired power station on the Navajo Reservation, east of Page. It took 17 years to fill the basin. Today, high water consumption by the population and the region's ongoing drought have drastically reduced the water level.