Tower Butte Helicopter Tour Over Lake Powell
A tower butte helicopter tour lifts off from Page Municipal Airport and crosses the sandstone mesas above Lake Powell, with Glen Canyon Dam, Antelope Canyon's rim and the Colorado River spread out below. Most tower butte helicopter tour tours include a landing on the 5,300-foot summit of the butte itself, a flat Navajo Sandstone platform reachable only by air, where passengers step out onto rock that has been isolated for millions of years. Pilots narrate the geology of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area as you fly, pointing out Padre Bay, Gunsight Butte and the layered cliffs that give this corner of northern Arizona its color.
Tower Butte stands roughly 1,000 feet above the surrounding desert floor, and its flat crown is reachable by no trail, road, or rope — only by air. That single geological accident explains why the tower butte helicopter tour exists at all.
The formation is a remnant of the Navajo Sandstone layer that once covered this entire region, a stratum laid down by wind-driven dunes during the Jurassic period and since stripped away by the Colorado River and its tributaries. What remains is an isolated mesa, a survivor of erosion rather than an act of uplift.
The butte sits within Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, on land bordering the Navajo Nation, and departures leave from Page Municipal Airport at 238 10th Avenue. Page itself was founded in 1957 as a construction camp for Glen Canyon Dam; the town's airport was built to serve engineers, and only later became the gateway to scenic flight operations across the Colorado Plateau. History here is short and industrial, but the landscape it opened up is not.
What gives the site its significance today is the vantage it provides. From the summit, the eye travels across Lake Powell's flooded side canyons, the Vermilion Cliffs to the west, Navajo Mountain rising to the southeast, and the sandstone fins of the Kaiparowits Plateau beyond. Few places in the American Southwest compress so many named landmarks into a single horizon. Photographers value the low-angle light that rakes across the cross-bedded rock; geologists value the exposed section, where wind-deposited layers are legible as tilted lines in the cliff face.
Access is deliberately limited. Landing permission on the summit is granted only to authorized operators, which makes the tower butte helicopter tour tickets less a matter of convenience than of permission. Entry to the area itself is free — 0 USD — with the tour price covering the exclusive landing. Flights operate daily from 07:00 to 18:00, and the official operator information is published at papillon.com.
Seen from above, the desert reads as a system rather than a series of viewpoints. Lake Powell's blue arms trace the drowned channels of a canyon that existed for millions of years before 1963. The buttes stand as index markers of a lost land surface. A Page Arizona scenic flight tour makes that legibility possible in a way no ground-level approach can. Tower Butte helicopter tour tours remain among the few experiences in Glen Canyon that place visitors on ground otherwise untouched.
45 min
