THE PROJECT AND THE DAM The Glen Canyon Dam, Powerplant, and Reservoir, which will be known as Lake Powell in honor of the western explorer and geologist, John Wesley Powell, are the principal storage and power features of the Upper Colorado River Storage project. The dam will be on the Colorado River in Arizona, 13 river miles below the Utah border. Lake Powell will store about 28,000,000 acre feet of water—next in size to Lake Mead, downstream, America’s largest man-made lake—to help solve a w

Bridges were among the first essentials at Glen Canyon damsite. The vertical walls of the Canyon rise about 700 feet above the river. The distance from rim to rim is only 1,200 feet in a straight line, but it is about 190 miles by road. The Glen Canyon Bridge, a spectacular rim-to-rim highway, spans the canyon immediately downstream from the dam. It is the highest and second-longest steel arch bridge in the United States; its 1,028 foot arch stands 700 feet above the river. The deck is 1,271 fee

Glen Canyon Dam, like all large Reclamation dams, is being built by private construction companies that are awarded contracts by competitive bidding. The prime contract, totaling $107,955,122, was awarded to the Merritt-Chapman and Scott Corporation of New York City, April 29, 1957. It provides for construction of the dam and powerhouse and is the largest single contract the Bureau has ever awarded and probably the largest for any type of construction project. By June 1960, the contractor had co

The Glen Canyon of the Colorado River is an unusually placid, 162-mile reach from Hite, Utah, to Lees Ferry, Arizona. Major John Wesley Powell, who headed the first expedition down the river in 1869, named it Glen Canyon because of the occasional oak glens along its banks and at its junctions with tributaries. The 186-mile-long Glen Canyon Reservoir (Lake Powell) will extend upstream into Cataract Canyon. The lake and adjoining lands have been established as the Glen Canyon National Recreation A