What is Page Lake Powell Campground?
Page exists because of Glen Canyon Dam, and most of its visitors exist because of Horseshoe Bend and Antelope Canyon. Page Lake Powell Campground is the private campground that serves them: a 160-site park (the owners’ figure; directories count fewer) on the south edge of town, open since 1998, with rows of gravel full-hookup 30/50-amp RV pads, electric-and-water sites, dry tent pads and dry campsites, and a growing lodging side of tiny homes, cabin homes and glamping wagons with real beds and bathrooms. There is an indoor pool, a playground, a store, restrooms, showers, laundry, a dump station and fiber Wi-Fi that actually works.
It is not scenic. The sites are close, the shade is young trees and awnings, and US 89 and Coppermine Road are audible all night. What it is instead is practical: a hot shower and a pool at 4,250 feet after a day in the sand at Lake Powell, within ten minutes of every Page attraction and a Safeway. Compared with the Park Service’s Wahweap campground, it has a pool and town around it; compared with Lone Rock Beach, it has everything Lone Rock does not, and none of the sand or the stars.
What you get is convenience, hookups and a bed you did not have to inflate, in a town built for exactly this kind of visitor. What you do not get is quiet, distance from the highway, a view of the lake, or any pretense of wilderness. If the point of the trip is the slot canyon at nine and the bend at sunset, that trade is correct.
How to camp Page right
Book direct and early. Dynamic pricing, booked on the campground’s own site with no booking fee. In 2026 guests report full-hookup sites in the $60s, tent pads from the high $20s, and tiny homes and wagons from about $100. The tiny homes and wagons sell out months ahead for spring break and every week from May to September; the RV rows have more give. Check-in is self-service, so a late arrival is fine.
Get there. I-17 north to Flagstaff, then US 89 north 135 miles through Cameron, past the Gap and over Antelope Pass to Page. About 4 hours 30 minutes and 280 miles, all paved, with gas at Cameron and Bitter Springs. As US 89 climbs into Page, turn right on Coppermine Road just before the SR 98 junction; the campground is a short way down on the left, before the airport. For the broader route north, see the day trips guide.
Ask for the back row. Road noise is the one consistent gripe. A site on the east side of the park, away from Coppermine Road and US 89, is the difference between hearing trucks and not.
Pick the season. Open all year. March through May and September through November are comfortable. Summer is 95 to 105 degrees and the busiest time, with Antelope Canyon traffic filling the town; the indoor pool is the reason to be here in July rather than at Wahweap. Winter nights freeze and the town is quiet.
Water and hookups. Full hookups on the RV rows; water, restrooms and showers for the tent rows. Some guests report balky water spigots at tent pads, so carry a jug. The dump station is on site.
Shop in town. Page has a Safeway and a Walmart. Buy food here rather than hauling it from the Valley.
Plan the attractions around the heat. Horseshoe Bend is a 10-minute drive and a 1.5-mile round-trip walk with no shade, $10 a car at the city lot; go at sunrise, when the lot is empty and the light is on the water. Antelope Canyon is on Navajo land and visited only by guided tour, booked weeks ahead in season; the Upper canyon is the easy one, the Lower one has ladders. Lake Powell itself has a separate $30 per-vehicle entrance fee if you go to Wahweap or Lone Rock, and the ramps move with the water; the drought entry explains why the lake you see may not be the one in the photographs.
Dogs. Leashed, at RV and tent sites; check the policy for lodging units when you book.
Skip it if you came for stars and silence. Drive 15 minutes to Lone Rock, 45 to Lees Ferry, or over the river to Jacob Lake in the pines. And if your saved maps show a “Falls Campground” or a “Cascade Campground” in south Page, neither exists as far as we can find; this is the only campground on Coppermine Road.
The town the dam built
There was no Page before the dam. The sandstone bench above the Colorado called Manson Mesa was Navajo Nation land, and the government got it in a trade: the Navajo ceded the mesa in exchange for land near Aneth, Utah, and the 17-square-mile townsite was carved out of the deal. Congress authorized the Colorado River Storage Project in April 1956, and on October 15, 1956 the first dynamite went off at the right diversion tunnel in Glen Canyon. The camp that rose on the mesa for the workers was called Government Camp and then renamed for John C. Page, Commissioner of Reclamation from 1936 to 1943. The Glen Canyon Bridge, 700 feet above the river, opened on August 11, 1957 so that trucks could reach the far side; by 1959 the camp had electricity, a school and rows of temporary houses.
The dam went up in six years. Concrete began on June 16, 1960. On January 21, 1963 the gates closed over the diversion tunnel and Lake Powell began to rise, drowning a canyon that almost nobody had seen. The dam topped out on September 13, 1963, made its first electricity on September 4, 1964, and was dedicated by Lady Bird Johnson on September 22, 1966. The lake took 17 years to fill, reaching full pool at 3,700 feet on June 22, 1980, and in the flood year of 1983 it came within inches of overtopping, chewing cavities in both spillways. Page, meanwhile, stopped being a company camp: it incorporated on March 1, 1975, and the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station on the mesa’s edge, built in the 1970s, became the town’s biggest employer.
The town’s second life came from two holes in the sandstone. Antelope Canyon, a slot on Navajo land east of town, had been a local secret until the 1990s. On August 12, 1997 a thunderstorm seven miles upstream, under a nearly dry sky at the canyon, sent a flood through Lower Antelope that killed eleven tourists, seven of them French, and swept away the amateur ladders; the Navajo Nation rebuilt the access, bolted the ladders down and made both canyons guided-tour only. The year after, 1998, this campground opened on Coppermine Road, which is about when Page began turning from a dam town into a tour town. Horseshoe Bend, five miles south, went from an unmarked pullout to a social-media landmark drawing more than two million people a year; the City of Page built a lot and in 2019 began charging $10 a car, collecting $20.3 million by mid-2024, with the money going to a railed overlook, restrooms and the rangers who pull people back from the edge.
The dam’s story has not ended either. The Navajo Generating Station shut down in 2019 and its three stacks were demolished on December 18, 2020, taking the town’s old payroll with them. And the lake has been shrinking: drought dropped Lake Powell to 3,522 feet on April 22, 2022 and to a record 3,519.92 feet on April 13, 2023, close enough to the dam’s minimum power pool that Reclamation began planning for a reservoir that might not generate at all. The Wahweap ramps have been extended downhill more than once. Page now lives on visitors, and the campground on Coppermine Road, with its tiny homes and indoor pool, is a fair picture of what they want.
Why it matters
Page is the clearest place in Arizona to see what the Colorado River’s plumbing cost and what it bought: a Navajo mesa traded for Utah land, a canyon drowned, a town invented, and then a town reinvented around a slot canyon and a bend in the river when the dam’s coal plant closed and the lake dropped. The campground is a small part of that, but a telling one; it opened the year after the Antelope Canyon flood, as the tourists arrived, and it sells exactly what they need, which is a shower, a pool and ten minutes to everything. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain: stay here if you want convenience and hookups for a Page weekend, stay at Lone Rock if you want the lake, and either way go to the bend at sunrise.