NPS Withdrawal: 1979
Transferred to the U. S. Forest Service in 1979.
National Parks Traveler
Even before the Shadow Mountain Dam was constructed, it was abundantly clear that Shadow Mountain Lake and its shoreline would be a resource of great scenic, recreational, and ecological value. Because the Bureau of Reclamation was in the business of building dams, not managing scenery, recreational facilities, and wildlife habitat, the agency was quite happy to turn the latter functions over to the National Park Service on June 27, 1952.
Shadow Mountain Recreation Area remained a very lightly developed National Park System component for the better part of three decades before finally being transferred to the U.S. Forest Service by an act of Congress that took effect on March 1, 1979. The previous year, Congress had created a 36,000-acre water and forest wonderland called the Arapaho National Recreation Area. The ANRA featured five major lakes in the upper Colorado River Valley -- Lake Granby, Shadow Mountain Lake, Monarch Lake, Willow Creek Reservoir, and Meadow Creek Reservoir. (Area tourism promoters like to call these five ANRA lakes, plus adjacent Grand Lake, “the Great Lakes of Colorado.") Since Shadow Mountain Recreation Area was focused on a man-made water body, lacked nationally significant resource values, and could not be simply folded into Rocky Mountain National Park, it made a lot of sense for Congress to turn the management of this property over to the agency administering the newly established Arapaho National Recreation Area.