Driving back through Page, Arizona — one of the youngest towns in the country, built in 1957 to house Glen Canyon Dam workers, on land at the edge of the Navajo Nation.
Back in the car now, and as we drive north on Highway 89 into the town of Page, look around — because this whole town is younger than plenty of the cars that have driven through it. Page didn't exist at all until nineteen fifty-seven. There was nothing up here but bare mesa and sagebrush.
Then the government decided to build an enormous dam a few miles north, and a dam that big needs an army of workers, and an army of workers needs somewhere to live. So they simply built a town from scratch on top of this flat mesa — houses, schools, stores, streets — to house the dam builders and their families. They called it Page, after a Bureau of Reclamation commissioner. For years it was one of the newest incorporated towns in the entire United States, a company town in the middle of nowhere, born to build one dam.
The dam got finished, but the town stuck around — because it turned out to sit at the doorway of some of the most spectacular country on Earth, and the tourists came. Today Page is the base camp for all of it: Horseshoe Bend, Lake Powell, the slot canyons. And look at the land around you as we roll through — this red-rock country is the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the country, and Page sits right at its edge on land that was traded from the Navajo people. Boone's got their story for you as we drive. Stay on Highway 89 north; the dam is just ahead, and you'll feel the ground open up as we approach it.
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