Loch Powell got its name in respect of the traveller John Wesley Powell, who provided the primary enduring record of finding for the area after productively creation two hazardous trips by rowboat down the Green and Colorado rivers in 1869 and 1871; Powell was the one who in the beginning gave Glen Canyon its name. In his work, The Examination of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, Powell described the region as ". . .an enquiring collection of magnificent features; imprinted walls, imperial arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds and monuments.. . We came to a decision to identify it as Glen Canyon."
Nowadays the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area is the land of community that, is managed by the National Park Service, and is offered to the community for leisure purposes, such as house -boating, fishing and waterskiing.
The stunning site dominating this gorge country is the invention of eons of geologic activity: shifting of continents, worldwide rising and falling of sea levels and formation of highlands now worn and deposited.
At times, wasteland dominated the landscape; from time to time, freshwater or saltwater seas invaded, leaving rivers to corrode the most recently deposited layers. Prevailing winds abetted the development and there were also periods of corrosion which account for missing rock stratum and layers appearing in another place.
The geologic legend of Glen Canyon takes it start from a big, shallow inner sea with levels that rose and cut down over an era of 250 million years. The ground was every so often covered with water, resulting in "continental" and "marine" rocks. The development of the Land which makes up Glen Canyon today was carved by degree of difference erosion from the Colorado River about 5 million years. The Colorado Plateau, through which the canyon cuts, arose some 11 million years before. Inside that raised ground lays lots of layers of rock from over 300 million years back to relatively new volcanic rock.
