The 9 best beaches on Lake Powell (by boat or by car)

Quick answer

This list runs south to north, from Glen Canyon Dam up-lake, because that’s how you’ll meet these beaches from the water. A note before you pick one: sand on this lake moves. The same cove can be a wide bench one summer and a narrow shelf the next as the lake rises and falls — check the current water level at lakepowellwaterlevel.com before you go, then confirm with your own eyes when you arrive.

Beach	Where	Get there by	Best for
Lone Rock Beach	Wahweap area, UT side	Car or boat	Drive-up camping, big groups
Wahweap Swim Beach	Across from Wahweap Campground	Car (day use)	Kids, motor-free swimming
Warm Creek Bay	A few miles from Wahweap	Boat	First-night houseboat camps
Padre Bay	About lake mile 19	Boat	Classic sand coves, multi-day trips
Gunsight Canyon	Off Padre Bay	Boat	Semi-seclusion mid-lake
Labyrinth Canyon	Padre Bay region	Small boat	One-boat pocket beaches
Stanton Creek	Bullfrog area	Car or boat	North-lake convenience
Halls Creek Bay	~93 lake miles above the dam	Boat	Lots of sites, big bays
Good Hope Bay	Upper lake	Boat	Room and quiet, self-contained trips

1. Lone Rock Beach — the drive-up classic

Lone Rock is one of the very few places on the lake where you can drive a vehicle onto the sand and boat right up to the same shoreline. It sits just north of the Utah line off US-89, in sight of the sandstone monolith it’s named for, and it’s the busiest beach on the lake for exactly that reason.

Camping is first-come, first-served, year-round, and costs $14 per vehicle per night on top of the park entrance fee (as of mid-2026, $30 per vehicle for 7 days). Vault toilets are spread across the beach, with seasonal showers, potable water and a dump station near the paved entrance. Two warnings the NPS makes plainly: the sand gets soft near the water and the park doesn’t guarantee a tow, and glass containers are banned on the beach. There’s also a fenced ORV area — the one spot in the park where non-street-legal off-road vehicles can run.

2. Wahweap Swim Beach — the motor-free option

Wahweap Swim Beach is a day-use beach across from Wahweap Campground, and it’s the only downlake swimming spot where motorized boats can’t come past the buoy line. That makes it the calmest place on the southern lake to put kids in the water, with only paddle craft — kayaks and boards — past the sand.

Park in the gravel lot on Lakeshore Drive between the picnic area and Stateline ramp, and walk the sandy path down. One portable toilet on the way is the last restroom before the water, so plan accordingly. No camping here, no glass, no lifeguard — that last one is true of the entire lake. If your group is staging out of Wahweap Marina, this beach is the easy answer for the afternoon before the houseboat checks in.

3. Warm Creek Bay — the first-night beach

Warm Creek Bay is where a huge share of Wahweap houseboat trips spend night one, and it earns it: a short run from the marina, wide sandy shorelines, and enough side coves that you can usually find shelter from a south wind. Fred’s Guide has called its beaches extensive for decades, with the honest caveat that the exact sand depends on the lake that year.

The move is to leave the marina with time to spare, pick your cove while the light is good, and anchor for the night — the park itself recommends beaching boats overnight because high winds move floating boats into rocks. Open beaches here have long views; the coves give you wind protection and fewer neighbors.

4. Padre Bay — the classic sand coves

Padre Bay, around lake mile 19, is the largest open water on Lake Powell and the densest collection of sandy coves on the southern half. Cookie Jar Butte and the bay’s many inlets hide campsites large and small, and most veteran boaters would put their favorite beach somewhere in this bay.

The north side runs up against high Glen Canyon cliffs, so the bigger benches tend to sit on the other aspects. On summer weekends the well-known coves fill by afternoon — the standing tactic on boater forums is to send the fast boat ahead of the houseboat to scout and hold a spot. If you’re planning the run up, the distance guide puts the legs and fuel in one place.

5. Gunsight Canyon — small on purpose

Gunsight Canyon, tucked between Padre Bay and the main channel, has fewer beaches than its big neighbor — and that’s the appeal. Trip reports pick it precisely because fewer houseboats fit, so the camps that exist feel like yours. There’s still real sand: boaters on WaynesWords describe plenty of beaches in Gunsight and around the corner in Padre.

Fewer sites means the good ones go early. Treat Gunsight as a first-choice-with-a-backup, not a guarantee, and have a Padre Bay cove in your pocket for the weekends it’s taken.

6. Labyrinth Canyon — pocket beaches in a slot

Labyrinth Canyon is the nearest navigable slot to the Wahweap side, a narrow, twisting corridor best entered with a runabout or PWC, throttled way down. At the back and in small side pockets, sand collects into compact one-or-two-boat beaches with canyon walls straight out of the postcard.

These pockets come and go with the lake, so treat any specific report as a snapshot. Idle in, look, and commit only when you can see the slope. It’s a different kind of beach day — less volleyball, more quiet — and it pairs well with a morning exploring the walls. For more canyons worth the detour, see our guide to Lake Powell’s side canyons.

7. Stanton Creek — the north lake’s front porch

Stanton Creek, on Bullfrog Bay, is the north lake’s version of convenience: shoreline camping close enough to marina services that forgetting the ice isn’t a crisis. A primitive campground at Stanton Canyon brings drive-in campers to the same shoreline boaters beach on, so it’s a mixed crowd — trucks and tents on one stretch, houseboats on the next.

Note for 2026: Bullfrog’s floating marina services have temporarily moved to deeper water near Halls Crossing, so check the Bullfrog Marina guide for what’s operating where before you count on fuel or supplies at the ramp side.

8. Halls Creek Bay — quantity has a quality

Halls Creek Bay, about 93 lake miles above the dam, is the north lake’s big beach warehouse. Fred’s Guide counts many good campsites here while warning that seclusion is hard because everyone knows it — and that some of the side canyons entering the Waterpocket Fold nearby are steep-walled with no campsites at all.

Scout it slowly on arrival. The bay’s entrance reads misleading on charts, and a promising-looking side canyon can turn out to be all rock. When you find sand, there’s usually a lot of it, with room for a multi-boat camp.

9. Good Hope Bay — the far, quiet one

Good Hope Bay sits in the upper lake, past the point where most weekend traffic turns around. When the lake cooperates, its margins open into broad sand and mud beaches with space for several houseboats to spread out far beyond earshot of each other. This is the beach for the fully self-contained trip.

Plan fuel like it matters, because it does: Dangling Rope Marina is permanently closed, so there is no fuel between the north-lake marinas and Wahweap — a round trip from either end has to carry its own margin. Run the numbers with the fuel planning guide before committing to the upper lake.

The rules for camping on a Lake Powell beach

Shoreline camping outside developed marinas is free and needs no permit, but the NPS camping rules that come with it are specific and enforced. The big one: every beach camp must have a portable toilet, unless your vessel has one aboard or there’s a toilet within 200 yards. Burying waste is prohibited, and a plain plastic bag doesn’t qualify — use a real wag-bag system. The park connects the dots in its own water advisory: waste left at busy beaches like Lone Rock ends up in the water people swim in.

The rest, quickly:

1. Campfires: below the high-water mark, wood only, 4 feet wide and high at most. No fireworks, ever. Fire restrictions can suspend all of it in a dry stretch.
2. Quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., unless otherwise posted.
3. Stay limits: 14 consecutive days, 30 days per year in the park.
4. Camping 100 feet or more back from the shoreline, groups over 12 must split and camp at least half a mile apart.
5. Houseboats sharing a beach park at least 100 feet apart — that’s a carbon monoxide rule, since generator exhaust pools around swim platforms in calm coves.
6. Cliff jumping and diving are prohibited in Glen Canyon, full stop. No legal height exists.

One more habit worth keeping: glance at the water before anyone swims. A pale-green film or surface scum means pick another cove and report it — the park tracks harmful algal blooms, and no beach is worth a sick kid. Wind is the other daily factor; afternoon blows are routine here, and the weather safety guide covers how to read a building storm before it reads you.

Key takeaways

1. Lone Rock is the only drive-up beach; it costs $14 a night per vehicle, and everything else on this list is free to camp.
2. By boat, the southern lake’s best sand clusters in Warm Creek Bay and Padre Bay; the north lake’s in Halls Creek and Good Hope.
3. A portable toilet is legally required at every beach camp — pack it or camp within 200 yards of one.
4. Beach the boat overnight, park houseboats 100 feet apart, and skip the cliff jumping — it’s banned outright.
5. Sand moves with the lake. Scout by eye when you arrive, and send the fast boat ahead on summer weekends.