Lake Powell
— red rock the colour the water rose to meet.
Not only on a wall.
“The second-largest reservoir in the United States, formed when Glen Canyon Dam plugged the Colorado River in 1963 and the river took seventeen years to fill it. A flooded canyon country of red Navajo sandstone and side-arms that go for miles — Rainbow Bridge, Antelope Canyon, the drowned town of Hite. Levels rise and fall with the drought; the bathtub ring marks the difference.
Lake Powell, 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.
Lake Powell is a reservoir on the Colorado River in southern Utah and northern Arizona, formed by Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona. At full pool (3,700 feet elevation) it stretches 186 miles upstream and holds about 25 million acre-feet — the second-largest reservoir capacity in the United States, after Lake Mead. The shoreline runs roughly 1,960 miles and the lake fills the former Glen Canyon and ninety-six side canyons in the Navajo Sandstone country. The dam was completed in 1963 and the lake first reached full pool in 1980.
The canyon walls are Navajo Sandstone — wind-deposited dunes from the early Jurassic, about 190 million years old, cemented now into cross-bedded cliffs that run red and salmon and pale gold as the iron oxidises. The same formation forms Zion's walls upstream and the slot canyons of Antelope and Cathedral. Underneath sit the Kayenta and Wingate Sandstones; above, the Carmel Formation caps the higher mesas. Powell's water has stained the porous lower walls a darker red where it touched and a chalky bathtub white where it has dropped back.
Most visitors access the lake from Wahweap Marina near Page, Arizona, or from Bullfrog Marina on the Utah side. Houseboat rentals run from both. Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the largest natural bridge in the world at 290 feet, sits fifty miles upstream by water and is reachable only by boat or a long hike from the Navajo Nation. Antelope Canyon enters near Page; Reflection Canyon enters from the north shore. The lake is administered by the National Park Service as Glen Canyon National Recreation Area; entrance fee applies.