Page, Arizona built its life on Lake Powell and a coal plant, but low water, a forced plant shutdown, and plunging visits now leave the desert town scrambling for jobs and stability.
Vice Mayor Mike Farrow stood on a warm October evening watching police officers and firefighters greet families at National Night Out, and the question that kept coming back was simple: what happens to the kids if the lake keeps falling?
USA TODAY reported that Lake Powell sits at roughly 21.6 percent full after a slight bounce from a historic low this summer, while visits to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area have slid nearly 30 percent from the 2023 peak of 5.2 million people. Last year the area drew about 3.7 million visitors. City officials say the slide continued this year.
Page is a town of about 7,100 people that exists because the federal government decided to dam the Colorado River. Congress authorized Glen Canyon Dam in 1956. President Dwight Eisenhower triggered the first construction blast from the White House that October. By Thanksgiving 1957, trailers and dirt roads marked the start of a community named for former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner John C. Page.
The Bureau wanted families, not a freewheeling boomtown. It gave land for churches. The result still lines Lake Powell Boulevard: one denomination after another on what locals call Church Row.
"The Bureau of Reclamation really wanted to inspire families to be a part of Page, and not so much promote the bars and drinking atmosphere. They really wanted to have more of a family atmosphere than bars everywhere... and gave land to plant churches. Now what you have is Church Row on Lake Powell Boulevard ‒ one denomination after another."
Debbie Moses, executive director of the Glen Canyon Conservancy, described that deliberate design. The government outfitted the new city with electricity, temporary homes, and a school for 200 students by the start of 1959. By mid-1961, Page held 6,000 people and ranked as Arizona’s tenth-largest city, with 1,500 students in school.
Jedediah Rogers wrote in a 2006 Bureau history that building a city from scratch on wind-blown desert sand was no simple task. Floyd Dominy, the commissioner who oversaw the dam, later called the filled reservoir the Taj Mahal of America and a worldwide attraction.
Hydroelectric power from the dam started in 1964. In the mid-1970s the Navajo Generating Station joined it, a coal-fired plant on leased Native land that employed roughly 1,000 people and burned about 8 million tons of coal a year mined near Kayenta.
That plant closed in 2019. Workers finished demolishing it about three years later. Federal officials at the time said coal power contributed to climate change and air pollution. The practical result, as the reporting lays out, was environmental policy that made coal more expensive than natural gas.
Adrian Augustine, 45, a Navajo Nation member who once tested coal ash at the plant, now works at the Pow Wow Trading Post assessing pawned items. He watched the economic hit land hard.
"The power plant was the main bread and butter here. When they got rid of that, that was a huge hit."
Augustine put the town’s story in older Western terms.
"It’s basically a boomtown. That's how so many of these communities got started. Gold, silver and water."
When the plant closed, workers left. Nonprofit and school contributions that once came with those paychecks dried up. Pawn activity became one visible signal of stress. The lake and the tourism that rode on it were supposed to carry more of the load. Both are under pressure.
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area covers the lake, Horseshoe Bend, Lees Ferry, and nearby draws such as Antelope Canyon. An all-time high of 5.2 million visitors came in 2023. The next year the count was already a million lower than that peak when measured against the later 3.7 million figure. Nearly 30 percent of the traffic disappeared in two years.
City officials point to high gas, hotel, and flight costs, plus a slowdown in international travel. A pre-pandemic study had found international tourists made up about 40 percent of Page visitors. Farrow and others also say constant media focus on low lake levels, including empty-looking images, leaves people thinking there is nothing left to see.
The lake is not empty. It is low. Hydrologists cited in the coverage say climate-driven changes in precipitation mean it will likely never be full again. Page already finished a new intake pipeline so the town can still pull water if the surface drops further. Hydroelectric output has fallen with the water.
Farrow, a military veteran who first visited on vacation in 2012 and later retired there, still tells people to come. He frames the lake as the difference between opportunity and empty horizons for the next generation.
"If I take the lake away from him, am I helping him or hurting him? If I take away the lake from those kids, what does that mean for jobs?"
He adds that every turn in the landscape still sells itself as a destination and that most people who visit end up coming back.
Al Thoms, 71, a retired schoolteacher, and his wife Kathy, 69, raised their children in Page after teaching in local schools and earlier in Kayenta. They still call the place an oasis after long drives through desert.
"We called it an oasis. You come in through the desert and all of a sudden you see trees."
Kathy’s summary is shorter: their whole life was here. Summers may take them abroad, but they return to the same streets, the same churches, and the same bet that water and visitors will keep the town alive.
Page became a self-governing city on March 1, 1975, after years of federal management. A copper mine on Navajo land south of town had already closed in 1968. The coal plant’s end in 2019 removed the second major industrial pillar. Tourism and the lake were left holding more weight than either was built to carry alone.
The Colorado River still runs at the bottom of the thousand-foot canyon. The dam still stands. The churches still line the boulevard. What no longer stands is the assumption that Washington’s energy rules and endless drought headlines would leave a remote desert economy untouched.
Page did not ask to become a symbol. It asked for steady water, steady work, and a fair chance to keep the oasis it built. Environmental mandates closed the plant that paid the bills. Falling lake levels and the story told about them are now thinning the visitor stream that was supposed to replace those paychecks. Remote towns that once powered and watered the West are left to manage the consequences while the policies keep coming from somewhere else.
