Shooting the Moon
April 28, 2026 — Day 35
Lone Rock Beach Campground, Glen Canyon Recreation Area, Big Water, UT
We did get to experience some rain. Well, more like a very light sprinkle but it counts!
We were pretty excited today, we were heading out to visit Antelope Canyon by boat!
What you can’t see in the photo is Lance, the Captain’s, face. He’s worried. His boat holds 6, 5 are on board and two are walking down the dock.
We showed up a day early! No big deal, we were able to rebook for two days later since we have already scheduled a walking tour of Antelope Canyon the next day. On the way back to the Jeep you could really see just how far Lake Powell has dropped. The bottom of the boat ramp is completely out of water. You can see the Jersey barriers way up at the top, that’s the bottom of the paved boat ramp.
So what to do? We had planned to visit the Carl Hayden Visitor Center for Glen Canyon Dam, so why not now?
It is pretty big! The bottom is 300 feet thick. These are views from the bridge over the Colorado River.
The trucks on the top really show the scale.
Lake Powell is low, really low.
According to the Google graphic power ceases to generate at 3490′. That’s less than 40′ left and they lose a foot or so a day. The good news is that Flaming Gorge, which we visited last trip, and some other upstream dam have been releasing extra water.
We had a great conversation with the ranger, he really loved being grilled on all sort of geeky questions that Paul asked. He told us that the American South West is in the middle of a 26 year drought. It isn’t clear if this is weather, climate change or a combination of both. All they know is more data is needed. But the lake is as low as it has ever been since 1969 when it first reached full capacity.
The lake peaked, twice, in the early and mid 80s. There was serious danger there. Paul got his answer about the spillways. They are internal and explains why the white staining went so high up the walls (water is hard here so the salts color the red rock white).
Back during the first flood event they noticed chunks of concrete coming out the spillway tunnels and then chunks of sandstone!
He showed us a photo taken inside the spillway showing how much had eroded. The ground had eroded about the height of a 2 story house! And what caused all this? Remember that white staining, probably calcium carbonate had also coated the insides of the spillway and that created a rougher than expected surface causing a phenomenon known as cavitation. Making the obvious understatement, this is bad, very very bad. The cavitation creates great shocks and when it does it rips out concrete and then sandstone.
We forget how they fixed it. Maybe they just got lucky but there didn’t have the issue during the second flood time during the mid-80s.
This is a turbine propeller.
On the way back we took the scenic lake drive, it was gorgeous.
Clearly Paul was taking photos also, but, they’re lost. That’s ok, it happens. Susan lost some a week ago. That’s why we have two cameras. (Yes we really do keep telling ourselves that.)
Back at the camp we can see that all our neighbors have left. Neighbors were like the tides, they ebbed and flowed.
Paul went out to shoot sunsets again. Why not? It wasn’t anything special but this shot shows something interesting.
Look way down at the bottom, those are campers. Most of the campers were down there. We considered moving down there. Several times we drove down in the Jeep and weren’t convinced the move was better than where we were. We were there long enough that we could have but it felt, well, crowded down there. There should have been water down there. Lone Rock is off to the left, out of the shot and Lone Rock should be surrounded by water. We never went over to Lone Rock by foot.
If this landscape looks vaguely familiar you’d be right that you’ve seen it before. This beach has been featured in the original Planet of the Apes. It was also key in two episodes of Doctor Who’s “The Impossible Astronaut”.
We should have had exceptionally dark skies, Paul wanted to try some astrophotography, but the moon was coming into full. Can’t fight Mother Nature so lets shoot the moon.
Paul also remembers when photos like that were difficult.