Big Water sits on US-89 in the southeast corner of Kane County, fifteen miles west of Page, Arizona, and the Glen Canyon Dam. The town was originally a 1960s construction camp for the dam workers and reorganized into an incorporated municipality in the 1980s. The community is small, hot, and at the entry point to the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument's southern boundary.
A dam-construction town that didn't disappear
When Glen Canyon Dam construction began in 1957, several work camps sprang up along US-89 to house the labor force. Most of those camps were dismantled when the dam was completed in 1966; Big Water — then called "Glen Canyon City" — survived because of the local Mormon Fundamentalist community led by Alex Joseph, who founded a separate non-FLDS polygamous group and held the town together through the 1970s and early 1980s. The town was incorporated and renamed Big Water in 1983, and Joseph served as its first mayor. The early-1990s civic transition moved the town away from a single-religious-community footprint, and the modern town is a small mixed-population community on the dam-and-Lake-Powell access route.
Grand Staircase–Escalante and paleontology
The Big Water Visitor Center, opened in 2003 as part of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument network, focuses on paleontology — the surrounding Kaiparowits Plateau and Tropic Shale country have produced some of the most important Late Cretaceous dinosaur fossils in North America, including several species described from local specimens. The visitor center is on the BLM-managed Grand Staircase boundary and is one of the smaller of the monument's interpretive sites. The plateau country to the north includes some of the most remote backcountry in the lower 48.
A US-89 corridor stop
The town's working economy is small services on US-89 — gas, food, lodging — for travelers headed to or from Page, Lake Powell's Wahweap Marina, and the Grand Staircase. The Wahweap area, fifteen miles east, is the principal Lake Powell boating access for the southwest end of the lake; from Big Water it's a short drive to the marina, the houseboat docks, and the dam viewpoint. The Vermilion Cliffs and Coyote Buttes country sits to the southwest.
What the town is structured around
US-89 runs east–west through the heart of Big Water; most of the residential and commercial parcels are on or near the highway. The Big Water Visitor Center is a few minutes east of the town center. The town's elevation (4,094 ft) and southern exposure make it one of the warmer Kane County communities, with hot summers and mild winters. It is one of the few towns in the 435 whose origin is a federal dam project rather than a 19th-century Mormon settlement, and one of the very few where a mid-20th-century communal-religious leader served as the founding incorporated-mayor.