Lake Mead, Nev. ? Jason and Cori Babcock towed their new boat here on Saturday from Southern California, expecting to ski carefree on one of the nation’s largest recreational lakes. Instead, they discovered what hundreds of thousands of other vacationers are encountering throughout much of the West this holiday weekend.

A stubborn decadelong drought is taking its toll on the great outdoors, upsetting boaters, campers and anglers who had grand plans to kick off the summer season.

No sooner had the Babcocks arrived here when they were warned by a park ranger that the water level is so low, rocky pinnacles are jutting perilously above the water’s surface even out in the middle of the lake. Cori Babcock was unsettled by the prospect of such a frightening water-skiing hazard.

“That’s causing me some real concerns,” she said, her boat bobbing on the water’s surface that is nearly 50 feet lower than normal.

From Arizona to Wyoming, all along the West’s intermountain region, lake levels have dropped so significantly that many boat launching ramps lead only to blistered, sun-dried mud. Some die-hard fishermen in Arizona are heaving their trolling boats over previously submerged boulders to get on the water. Once-vigorous fishing streams in Colorado are puny trickles.

Weekend vacationers also were being denied campgrounds in three states because of drought-enhanced fires in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, where the northern part of the state was all but off-limits to campers because of the fire hazard.

Four of New Mexico’s five national forests and three state parks were closed because of fire danger. Among several fires burning there, one 40 miles north of Santa Fe, had grown to 10,000 acres.

Many New Mexico-bound tourists are re-routing to campgrounds in southern Colorado, only to run smack into the nation’s highest priority wildfire raging in the Pike and San Isabel National Forest.

“By the time they get to us, they think there are fires everywhere,” said Lance Tyler, a forest recreation specialist. “It used to be that people thought ‘The West is on fire.’ Now they think, ‘The West is closed.”‘

In fact, the vast majority of parks and forests remain open.