This week’s dream: houseboating in Arizona

The Arizona desert is not the place for a family holiday. With air so hot it feels “choked” of oxygen, it offers no “bucket-and-spade” opportunities, says Bella Pollen in the Financial Times – unless you’re at Lake Powell. This vast reservoir is “a surreal oasis” in the dust, created by the Glen Canyon Dam, a highly “controversial” hydroelectric project completed in 1963. Before the flood, it was sacred ground for the Navajo and Hopi people. And along with the “archaeological sites and geological treasures” that were submerged, this once “majestic gash in the earth” supported abundant plant and animal life. Today, it’s like the aftermath of a “disaster movie”, but one in which “everything turned out eerily OK”.

Lake Powell has about 2,000 miles of shoreline, crimped with canyons, “caves, grottoes and alcoves”. To explore them you can hire a houseboat – “wonderfully tacky, old-school” vessels that sleep 12 and are “practical to a fault”. They have hot showers, barbecues, slides for swift access to the water and tiny cabins. (You may find their flat roofs provide the best place to sleep, under the stars.) The boats are hard to steer, “horrible to reverse” and finding a mooring can be “a frazzled game of musical chairs”. But once the ropes are tied, steaks grilled and wine uncorked, “all is forgiven”.

Days pass under bright blue skies, squeezing the boat’s hulk through canyons and cliffs, pulling up at spits of sand where small fish ripple the water, paddleboarding and swimming in “emerald waters”. This “bizarre and beautiful” place gets three million visitors a year, but it’s big enough to absorb them. Each year, too, the region gets “hotter and drier”, and water levels drop a bit lower. The lake’s “visual magic” makes it “easy to believe that man has got one over nature. But everyone knows nature ends up having the last laugh.” For houseboat rentals, visit lakepowell houseboating. com. A deluxe boat sleeping 12 costs from $6,979 for seven days.