Page sits on Manson Mesa above Lake Powell, on the Arizona side of the Utah-Arizona line and a short drive from the Glen Canyon Dam. The town is technically not in the 435 — it is in Coconino County, Arizona — but it is the closest urban-services center for Lake Powell, sits at the eastern edge of Kane County’s recreation orbit, and is functionally part of the southern Utah travel network. Page is one of the youngest cities in the region (founded 1957) and is built around a federal water-and-power project rather than a 19th-century Mormon settlement.
A planned town on a piece of trade-back land
The Bureau of Reclamation began construction on Glen Canyon Dam in 1956. The dam workers needed a town, and the Bureau chose a 17-square-mile site on Manson Mesa above the dam — but the site was inside the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Tribal Council agreed to a land swap, trading the Manson Mesa parcel for an equivalent acreage of public land elsewhere. Page was platted in 1957 with a deliberate planned-town grid, named for the Bureau’s Indian commissioner John C. Page, and grew with the dam project through the early 1960s. When the dam was completed in 1966 the construction labor force left, but Page survived because Lake Powell was filling behind the dam and the National Park Service was developing Glen Canyon National Recreation Area as a tourism destination.
Lake Powell and the recreation economy
Lake Powell — the second-largest reservoir in the United States by capacity (when full) — is the working economy of Page. The Wahweap Marina, four miles north of town, holds the principal houseboat fleet and recreational boating access for the southwest end of the lake. Striped bass, smallmouth bass, walleye, and catfish are the primary game species; the lake supports a year-round fishing economy. Houseboating, slot-canyon paddling (Antelope Canyon, Lone Rock Canyon, the Wahweap Slot), and stand-up paddleboarding fill the warmer months. Drought-driven low water levels through the 2020s have moved the marinas multiple times and altered the working geography of the lake’s accessible sections.
Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend
Two of the most-photographed natural features in the U.S. are within five miles of downtown Page. Antelope Canyon — the slot-canyon system on the Navajo Nation east of town — is accessed by guided tour only through Navajo-licensed operators, and the upper and lower sections see hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The fee structure and tour-only access reflect the canyon’s status as a Navajo Tribal Park. Horseshoe Bend, a 1,000-foot-deep meander of the Colorado River three miles south of town on US-89, is operated as a city-managed overlook with a paved trail and parking fee — one of the more iconic image-and-overlook surfaces in the country.
What the town is structured around
US-89 runs through Page from the northwest (toward Big Water and Kanab) to the southeast (toward Tuba City and the Navajo Nation interior). The town’s grid is 1950s planned-suburban, with the older commercial spine on Lake Powell Boulevard. The Navajo Generating Station — a coal-fired power plant that long ran adjacent to the dam — was decommissioned in 2019, removing one of the town’s larger employers. Page is the only town in the 435 orbit founded as a federal construction camp, the only one inside the Navajo Nation’s gateway corridor, and the only one where the working economy is built around a single 1960s-era reservoir.