Lake Powell Offers Unparalleled Beauty and Solitude, if You're Willing to Make the Spreadsheets

If you are thinking about maybe having a bachelor party on a houseboat on Lake Powell, my first advice is this: don’t. Unless, that is, you happen to really, really love logistics.

Lake Powell is a truly beautiful place, a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River that dances back and forth over the Utah-Arizona border. Towering red sandstone walls surround much of the lake, broken up by occasional scrabbly beaches and spiny fingers of slickrock canyons that protrude in all directions. It looks barren, it looks like The Lone Ranger, it looks like the surface of Mars. And organizing a group trip of a dozen dudes (gender-neutral form) requires about as much planning as a film shoot or an interplanetary expedition.

There are functionally no services (including cellular) when you’re out on the lake, and anything you need is at least an hour away by speedboat in daylight and practically inaccessible after sunset. There is no popping out to the grocery store if you forget the penne pasta; you cannot retreat to the pub if you run out of ice and (heaven forbid) the beer gets warm. Houseboat rental companies provide almost nothing except the boat itself and a vague promise to try to fix anything that breaks if you can’t fix it yourself—and stuff will definitely break. Your boat may not even have a first aid kit, in the event you lose a tussle with a can of beans (I can show you the scar).

So planning is absolutely essential, and you really do need someone with the aptitude and patience to do some deep spreadsheeting and doc-building: Identify dietary restrictions, delegate meal planning and prep, coordinate alcohol supply, track sunscreen volume, and make note of everyone’s personal watercraft preferences.

There is a reward for all of that neurotic preparation, though. The water of the lake is warm and calm, perfect for swimming, diving, paddling, tubing, and aquatic beer pong. The landscape is gorgeous and alien, and there are basically no rules and no one around to enforce them anyway—you can explore, climb things, jump off of those things into the water, make a racket, whatever.

And the solitude is absolutely unmatched. It presents a wholly different vision of life than the one you experience day to day in any modern town. You are with your group but otherwise radically alone. There are no guard rails, no cell phones, nothing to do, just vibing and surviving. And once the sun sets there is no light pollution and no noise—this is some of the very best stargazing in the country.

During the day you are totally on your own to explore the many canyons that shoot off the lake. Labyrinth Canyon is one of the best known and most popular, and even so you may only see a handful of other people on a busy holiday weekend. Pilot a speedboat as far as you can up the canyon, then anchor it on a beach where the canyon gets too narrow. Swim around the corner, then wade through the shallow water until you’re hiking on gravel and mud. The walls of the canyon get taller and closer together as you walk like the trash compactor in A New Hope, until you’re turning sideways to slide through hairpin turns too narrow for your shoulders and scrambling over muddy boulders slick with foul-smelling mud, with only the sliver of angled sunlight that fits between the narrow walls for light. It is a stunning place: natural swooping curves and striated rock walls, an imposing path but one that is unlike any other outside of these canyons.

On our way in to Labyrinth Canyon we passed another group heading back out, who told us they found the most amazing view they’d ever seen, a 12 on a ten-point scale they said, but it was about five minutes farther than they expected. So onward we pressed, past abandoned birds nests and inhabited snake holes, in search of this supposed spectacular vista. One person’s sandals got stuck in mud and broke, then another’s. Someone dropped their phone into deep water. We watched a toad eat tiny skittering insects. The low-effort graffiti scratched into the canyon wells petered out—we were clearly farther than most people go.

It had been about 45 minutes of walking and then another 15 minutes or so of begrudgingly trudging, more than half an hour farther than we thought we were going to walk, and nothing much had changed since we got into the slot canyon itself. One person was barefoot, at least two others were hobbling on broken sandals, we were covered in rank mud and out of water. We decided, after much pained deliberation, to turn around and abandon the quest for the 12 out of 10 view.

When we got back to the boat we came across a professional guide who worked out of the closest marina leading a group that was just starting up the canyon. We asked him if there was some stunning vista that we hadn’t quite reached. He told us he had hiked up the canyon for more than two hours, and it was all basically the same—we had been misled.

But when we finally made it back to the houseboat, tired and gross, we were once again rewarded for our preparedness: the beer was cold, the snacks were plentiful, and the dinosaur-shaped raft was fully inflated and just begging for a rider.

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