Glen Canyon Dam Page
— — a concrete arc that holds back a desert sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Glen Canyon Dam crosses the Colorado River at the head of Marble Canyon. The arch of concrete is 710 feet tall and holds back Lake Powell upstream. The town of Page was built on the mesa above to house the construction crews in the late 1950s. The river that runs out below the spillways is the cold green that carves the Grand Canyon downstream.
Glen Canyon Dam Page, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Glen Canyon Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam on the Colorado River in northern Arizona, immediately south of the Utah border. The dam stands 710 feet above bedrock and 583 feet above the original riverbed, with a crest length of 1,560 feet. It was authorized under the Colorado River Storage Project of 1956, built by the Bureau of Reclamation between 1956 and 1966, and dedicated by Lady Bird Johnson in September 1966. The reservoir it impounds, Lake Powell, is the second-largest reservoir in the United States by capacity, with 186 miles of mainstem at full pool.
The dam sits in Glen Canyon's Navajo Sandstone, a Jurassic-age formation roughly 180 million years old, deposited as a vast desert dune sea covering much of what is now the Colorado Plateau. The cliff-forming sandstone reads cream to apricot in low light, and the dam's concrete is colour-matched to it deliberately. Five miles downstream the river enters Marble Canyon, the start of Grand Canyon National Park. The Bureau used about 5 million cubic yards of concrete in the dam, poured in interlocking blocks and cooled with river water during the eight-year build.
The Carl Hayden Visitor Center sits on the west abutment of the dam off U.S. Highway 89 and is operated by the Bureau of Reclamation. Free guided tours of the dam interior run several times a day except when security conditions require pause. Page, the small mesa-top town two miles north, was platted in 1957 to house construction crews and is now the gateway to Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, and Lake Powell. Horseshoe Bend, the famous river meander, is five river-miles below the dam and a half-mile walk from a paid parking area off Highway 89.