"There was a perception, unfortunately incorrect, that the lake was not accessible or not as good" when levels were low, he said. "But it hasn't really affected the ability to get on the lake and have a good time."

Moab-area parks

Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Natural Bridges and Hovenweep national monuments form what the Park Service calls Southeast Utah Group.

"Operating budgets of the Southeast Utah Group have bounced back from the leaner times earlier in the decade," said Paul Henderson, chief of interpretation and visitor services at Arches and Canyonlands.

For example, this year "the group received operational budget increases to fund 31 centennial seasonal positions," including 10 at Arches, 16 at Canyonlands, one at Hovenweep and four at Natural Bridges, he said.

"These positions are all new seasonal positions and will greatly enhance our abilities to serve park visitors and protect park resources during the primary visitor season," he said.

He added that the parks will "meet or exceed the service levels of 2003," with increases this year in interpretive programs, back-country patrols and other programs. Since 2003, new visitor centers have opened at Hovenweep and Arches, and the Island in the Sky visitor center in Canyonlands is being expanded. He said many projects are being funded with shares of money from park entrance fees.

Dinosaur Monument

As mentioned, its main-attraction fossil quarry building closed two years ago. That led the monument to finish dead-last in 2007 among visitor satisfaction surveys in parks nationally. (Just 74 percent of visitors rated their experience as "very good" or "good," compared to a national average of 96 percent.)

Superintendent Mary Risser said that "providing a fully functioning facility for visitors, protecting the park's irreplaceable dinosaur fossils and making the dinosaur quarry accessible to the public are the top priorities for the National Park Service's Intermountain Region."

She said the service recently posted in the Federal Register its preferred option of providing a shelter over the fossil wall to protect the bones. That would allow visitors to see them on site, while other functions in the now-condemned visitor center could be moved to a more stable location.

Once that receives final approval, "we will be able to move forward with developing design and construction drawings, a process that typically takes at least a year. This way, we are ready to proceed as soon as we have the construction funds."