Lake Mead National Recreation Area : a history of America's First National Playground /

As the historian of Lake Mead National Recreation Area (NRA), the first of 18 such areas to be organized under the National Park Service (NPS), Foster (Grand Valley College) presents an overview of the consequences of adding large, water-based recreation areas (some in desert settings) for the public. A by-product of Boulder Dam, Lake Mead offers the opportunity for water-based recreation in arid lands. Foster's is a cautionary tale. He points out that the total number of annual visitors to the water-based NRAs now averages between seven and eight million, in contrast to all areas designated as national parks, whose average is little more than a million visitors per park a year. Although Foster's comparison between the visitation to NRA sites and traditional NPS sites is only one way to gauge the proportion of NPS resources that must be allocated to these hugely popular areas, it does illustrate the nature of the problem. Foster also predicts that even though the public will continue to expect the same level of water recreation as the NPS offered in the past, the effects of climate change will reduce NPS's ability to meet that expectation. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Polly Welts Kaufman, University of Southern Maine, retired