Navajo State Park occupies Colorado’s north shore of Navajo Lake, a large reservoir on the San Juan River that extends into New Mexico and is framed by mesas, hills, canyons, and riparian corridors. The area’s human history reaches back to Ancestral Puebloans, followed by Ute and Navajo settlement, later European entry, and railroad construction in the early 1880s that remained economically important until 1967. Navajo Dam, built in 1962 to provide irrigation water for the Navajo Nation, created the lake that now defines the park. Today the area is valued for boating, fishing, camping, wildlife viewing, and the meeting of several distinct habitats.