KVIG Informative

Six million visitors a year come to boat, swim and camp on Nevada’s largest reservoir without ever noticing that two separate federal agencies still answer for different pieces of it — a split in authority that traces to a recreation area Congress didn’t fully hand to the National Park Service until 28 years after the reservoir was created. Lake Mead National Recreation Area carried its current name for 17 of those years before Congress ever passed a law settling who was actually in charge.

The reservoir behind the dam then still called Boulder Dam filled after the dam’s Sept. 30, 1935, dedication, and federal officials designated the surrounding land and water the Boulder Dam Recreation Area on Oct. 13, 1936, according to National Park Service historical records. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Elwood Mead, who oversaw the dam’s construction as part of his role directing the bureau’s major water projects, died in 1936, and the reservoir was named in his honor that year, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s own history of its commissioners.

The recreation area itself took Mead’s name in 1947, becoming Lake Mead National Recreation Area — by the National Park Service’s own account, the first and largest national recreation area in the country. That same year, Lake Mohave, the reservoir formed behind Davis Dam downstream, was added to the recreation area’s boundary, according to National Park Service historical records.

For nearly three decades, no single federal agency ran the place. Lake Mead National Recreation Area was managed jointly by the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation from its creation until the Park Service was placed in sole jurisdiction on Oct. 8, 1964, according to National Park Service historical records.

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That 1964 handoff came through Public Law 88-639, enacted the same day, which Congress described as an act to provide an adequate basis for administration of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Arizona and Nevada, according to the U.S. Statutes at Large. The law, later codified in the section of the U.S. Code governing the recreation area, cited the area’s national significance and the need to give federal administrators a firmer basis to manage it for the public’s benefit.

The recreation area today spans roughly 1.5 million acres and draws more than six million visitors a year across the Arizona-Nevada line, according to National Park Service historical records — a scale that still requires the Park Service to coordinate with the Bureau of Reclamation, which continues to operate Hoover Dam and the water infrastructure the recreation area was built around.

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Nevada’s largest reservoir carries the name of a Reclamation commissioner who died before its recreation area took his name, ran for nearly three decades under two agencies with different jobs, and got only one law, passed in 1964, actually saying who was in charge. The division of labor that law set — the Park Service answering for recreation, Reclamation still answering for the water — is still how Lake Mead operates whenever the two missions collide.