How Page earned the score

Situation: a town with no earthly reason to be

Most American towns grow up around something: a harbor, a railhead, a courthouse, a mill. Page grew up around a construction schedule. In 1957 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation needed somewhere to house the thousands of workers who would spend the next nine years pouring Glen Canyon Dam, and there was nothing usable nearby. So the government built a town. It acquired its 17 square miles in a land exchange with the Navajo Nation, graded a mesa above the canyon, ran in power and water, and called the place Government Camp before settling on a name with a little more dignity (Wikipedia).

The growth was almost comically fast. On Thanksgiving Day 1957 the first workers moved into brand-new homes. By the start of 1959 the camp had electricity, temporary housing, and a school for 200 children. By mid-1961, barely four years from bare ground, Page held 6,000 people and was the tenth-largest community in Arizona, with 1,500 kids enrolled in school (Wikipedia). It sat at 4,101 feet on the edge of a canyon, hours from anywhere, and it existed entirely to serve a wall of concrete.

That is the situation every visitor-economy story at Creative City Developments starts with: a place with assets it did not choose and an identity it has to build on purpose. Page had a dam, a brand-new reservoir filling behind it, and a whole lot of red rock. What it did not yet have was a reason for anyone to visit on purpose.

Task: figure out how to outlive your own reason for existing

Glen Canyon Dam topped out in 1966. The 710-foot wall was, and still is, an astonishing object: the Bureau of Reclamation built it between 1956 and 1966, and the reservoir it holds back, Lake Powell, is the second-largest in the United States, with a capacity of more than 25 million acre-feet of water and a hydroelectric plant rated around 1,320 megawatts (Wikipedia). For a company town, though, a finished project is an existential threat. The construction crews and their families were the entire economy, and construction was over.

Page formally incorporated as a town on March 1, 1975, almost a decade after the concrete cured, and held a population near the same few thousand it had during the build (Wikipedia). For years its fortunes leaned on heavy industry, including the nearby Navajo Generating Station, a coal plant that became a major regional employer until it closed in 2019. The task in front of Page was the one that defines a town On the Map: stop being a place that makes something, and start being a place worth going to.

The raw materials were sitting right there. A 186-mile reservoir with nearly 2,000 miles of shoreline had appeared in the desert. A few miles outside town, the Colorado River made a near-perfect 270-degree loop around a sandstone tower. And on Navajo land just to the east, water and wind had carved a slot canyon so sculptural it would eventually be called the most photographed of its kind on earth. None of that was a strategy yet. It was just scenery waiting for a town to figure out what to do with it.

Action: turn the scenery into an economy

Step one: own the dam as an attraction

The first move was to stop apologizing for the industrial origin story and lean into it. Glen Canyon Dam is not a blemish on the landscape, it is the landscape’s headline act, and the Carl Hayden Visitor Center perched beside it turns a hydroelectric facility into a stop on the itinerary. The dam sits inside Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service, which gives Page a federal partner in interpreting and promoting the very structure that created the town. That recreation area is now a genuine heavyweight: it drew 5.2 million visitors in 2023, an all-time record (National Park Service).

Step two: build the infrastructure the views needed

The defining example is Horseshoe Bend. A decade ago, fewer than 40,000 people a year made the trip to the overlook, and many of them simply pulled onto the shoulder of U.S. Route 89 and walked out to an unmarked rim (Wikipedia). As social media turned the bend into a bucket-list image, the City of Page did something many towns talk about and few execute: it invested in the asset. Between 2018 and 2019 the city built a proper parking area, an accessible 1.5-mile trail, shade structures, a fenced viewing platform, and a visitor contact station, then began charging a modest per-vehicle fee to use it (National Park Service). The fee, ten dollars a car as of recent seasons, did two things at once: it managed a crowd that had grown to more than two million people a year, and it created a municipal revenue stream tied directly to the town’s most famous view (Wikipedia).

Step three: let the Navajo Nation lead on Antelope Canyon

Page’s other signature draw is not in Page at all, and that distinction matters. Antelope Canyon lies on Navajo Nation land just east of town, near the LeChee Chapter, and tourism there is run by and for Navajo families. The canyon, known in Navajo as Tsé Bighánílíní, the place where water runs through rocks, can only be entered on a guided tour with an authorized Navajo operator (Wikipedia). Page functions as the lodging, dining, and logistics base for a world-class attraction whose revenue flows to the tribe that owns it. By 2019 the canyon was drawing more than a million visitors a year and is routinely described as the most photographed slot canyon in the world (Visit Arizona). For Page, the smart play was never to compete with that, it was to be the town those million people sleep and eat in.

Result: a town of 7,400 hosting millions at the rim

The numbers tell the story of a town that found its second act. In 2023, visitors to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area spent roughly $540 million in the communities around the park, spending that supported 6,300 jobs and produced a cumulative benefit to the local economy of about $670 million, according to the National Park Service Visitor Spending Effects report for that year (St. George News, citing NPS). For a town whose entire permanent population is about 7,440 people (Wikipedia), that is an extraordinary multiplier: the visitor economy is many times larger than the town that hosts it.

Horseshoe Bend alone went from under 40,000 visitors a year to more than two million, a roughly fiftyfold increase, and the City of Page now collects parking revenue from a landmark it once watched people visit for free off the side of a highway (Wikipedia). Antelope Canyon adds another million-plus annual visitors who pass through town (Visit Arizona). Page today is a base camp brand, the name you book a hotel under when the real destinations are a dam, a reservoir, a river bend, and a slot canyon scattered around it.

That is also where the honest caveat lives, and where the opportunity sits. A base camp captures a fraction of what its visitors spend. Many of those millions are day-trippers who shoot Horseshoe Bend at sunrise, tour Antelope Canyon midday, and drive on to the Grand Canyon or Zion by nightfall. The biggest single lever for Page is conversion: giving people more reasons to stay a second night and spend that second evening downtown, not just photograph the rim and leave.

Takeaway: the Page playbook for any overlooked town

Page is not a postcard-pretty historic Main Street, and that is exactly why it is instructive. It is a planned federal grid on a mesa, less than seventy years old, with an industrial birth certificate. It earns a Visitor Impact Score of 72, On the Map, on the strength of a few hard assets and a willingness to build the infrastructure those assets demanded. The lesson is portable. Find the one thing only your town has, a landform, a factory, a festival, a story, then spend real public dollars making it easy, safe, and worth photographing.

The work that is left is the work most visitor towns share: turning footfall into overnights, and overnights into a downtown people choose to linger in. That gap between visitor volume and visitor value is precisely what the Visitor Impact Score measures, and precisely where the next dollar of effort pays off.