Camping in Lake Powell - A Fall Weekend Girls' Trip

laurenjones3112
Dec 10, 2025
3 min read

For the past four years, a group of my girlfriends has been going on an annual outdoorsy fall weekend girls' trip, trying to one-up ourselves every year. We all decided that no matter what we do in the future, our 2024 Lake Powell trip takes the cake. The only downside to this trip? It’s a lot of travel to get to. The closest major airport is Salt Lake City, requiring a 4ish hour drive down to the lake from the airport. However, this trip was SO WORTH IT.

The overview: We rented a pontoon boat, brought camping gear and paddleboards, and spent four days just exploring the lake and its many canyons.

With a large group like ours (I believe there were 10 of us), the pontoon boat was pretty affordable, though overloaded with 10 paddleboards and all of our overnight gear. There is a lot of planning that goes into a trip like this: where to camp, how to navigate the canyons, what to pack. There is no service out on the water so we made sure to have paper maps as well as downloaded maps on our phones. We had a general plan of where good campsites were, as well as about how long it would take to get to some of these checkpoints. We also brought all of our sleeping gear, food, and first aid/emergency gear.

Sunrise as we cowboy camped on some BLM land.

We camped on some BLM land near Bullfrog Marina on our first night out in southern Utah, catching up with everyone and making sure we had everything we needed. Then, on day one of the boating trip (after Utah woke us up with most magical sunrise), we went to pick up and load the pontoon with all of our stuff (there was a LOT). We headed out for a mostly full day of driving the pontoon boat down the lake, looking for somewhere secluded to camp. There are plenty of spots along the lake to stop and swim or have lunch. We took our time getting to our planned campsite, but when we arrived, we realized it was just too swampy and stinky. So, we navigated a little further into one of the canyon offshoots until we found a spot large enough to set up all of our stuff. Before dinner, we took the paddleboards out into a small canyon nearby to explore it up as far as we could. After eating backpacking meals around a campfire back at our site, we had a really beautiful, clear view of the stars and opted to cowboy camp all in a row.

The next day we spent a full day exploring the lake on our paddleboards. We took them out to explore a few canyons, had lunch at a new little swimming hole, played paddleboard chicken, and had some paddleboard races. It was a really beautiful day to just play and be kids. If I had a dollar for every time one of us said “wow, this is so insanely beautiful”, I could have covered our pontoon rental. Probably.

On the final morning we got up and loaded up the pontoon to head back to the marina. We had a few hiccups this day with the boat-we couldn’t get it to turn back on, but thankfully we had some spotty reception and were able to call the boat rental company to help us troubleshoot the problem. Then later, after making it nearly back to the marina (we were literally 3 minutes away), we ran out of gas. Just right there, practically within shouting distance. Unfortunately, our genius plan of using all of our paddleboard paddles to scoot us along didn’t work, so we again called the boat rental company and they kindly came out and gave us a gallon of gas to get us back.

All in all, this was a spectacularly beautiful and wild trip. I would do the whole thing again in a heartbeat. As for the time of year we went, it was perfect. It was the last weekend of September and we had perfectly clear skies the entire time. It wasn’t unbearably hot, but it was plenty warm enough to swim and paddle around. This was a trip I will never forget and I really hope to repeat one day. I cannot convey in words just how beautiful southern Utah is. Full of national parks, BLM camping, and cute little towns, this is an area of the US I think everyone should visit.