As visitors arrived at the entrance to Muir Woods National Monument on Wednesday morning, they were greeted by a sign: “Closed due to a lapse in appropriations.”
In other words, the federal government had shut down at 12:01 that day.
A National Park Service ranger greeted people by the closed gate, explaining the closure and recommending alternatives such as Roy’s Redwoods Preserve, about 45 minutes north, and hikes around Mt. Tamalpais — a California state park that remains open.
The shutdown has left Bay Area parks in mixed states. Muir Woods is fully closed. Alcatraz Island is slated to stay open. Other sites like Point Reyes National Seashore and Fort Point have partial closures, with some parking lots blocked or bathrooms locked.
Even park staff said they didn’t learn the plan until Tuesday afternoon.
One NPS superintendent, who was on a call with parks leadership on Tuesday, spoke to KQED on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation and losing their job, said this didn’t take place until 3 p.m. that afternoon.
The NPS had submitted a closure plan last week, but staff didn’t get direction from the Department of the Interior until the last minute. KQED has reached out to NPS and DOI for comment, and has not yet received a response.
The superintendent told KQED they were told to report on Wednesday and submit their closure plan, which included making a formal request for any essential employees they believed needed to continue working — and to then instruct everyone else to set out-of-office notifications on their emails and phones.
Then, “I’ll finalize any time sheets and lock the doors,” they said on Tuesday night.
At Muir Woods, tourists like Amelia Lei Cabatit expressed confusion.
“I thought I was being clever when I Googled and it said yesterday night that parks would remain open,” she said.
Cabatit came to California all the way from Hong Kong. Muir Woods was at the top of her list, she said, along with Yosemite, where she has reservations next week.
Yosemite remains partially open with reports of reduced staffing, but Cabatit fears it’s unlikely the shutdown will be resolved in time.
“Honestly, I’m heartbroken,” she said. “I’ve been everywhere from Africa to the Galapagos to Costa Rica. I tell you, there’s nothing as beautiful as California parks.”
Running national parks on a “skeleton crew” is going to be an issue for visitors, the superintendent warned, especially considering visitor numbers continue to rise.
More than 40 former superintendents signed a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last week, raising the alarm about what keeping some parks open with no staff could mean for visitors and the parks’ ecology itself.
They warned the safety of visitors is at stake, as there won’t be staff to direct them and emergency response times may be slower due to low staffing.
“If people go into Yosemite and they [don’t] know where to go or what to do, they’ll be on their own,” said Don Neubacher, former park superintendent for Yosemite and Point Reyes national parks.
Unsupervised visitors can also cause damage to parks, as happened at Joshua Tree National Park during the 2018–19 government shutdown, where bathrooms overflowed, pounds of trash accumulated, vehicles went off-road and iconic Joshua trees were cut down.
“What we saw last time required dozens of volunteers to step up and fill the gap left by lack of maintenance and lack of law enforcement,” said Kenji Haroutunian, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Joshua Tree. His group was one of those that helped maintain and clean up the park during and after the shutdown, and had urged NPS leaders to close Joshua Tree for the duration of any shutdown.
Instead, Haroutunian said, the park’s “partial opening” will once again “require some of the community to step up … to support the skeleton crew that’s likely to be in place for the foreseeable future.”
Russell Galipeau, former superintendent of Channel Islands National Park, said focusing only on human impacts of the shutdown misses another major issue: the consequences for research across NPS land.
While they’re not considered “essential” under a government shutdown, staff like wildlife biologists who help manage bear populations and monitor ecosystems are just as important — and their work, too, will get shut down, Galipeau warned.
“We forget that these parks, these natural areas, they don’t manage themselves,” he said. “Sometimes, intervention is necessary.”
At the Channel Islands, that means 40 years of data monitoring the health of the kelp forest or local populations of pinnipeds will now have a shutdown-sized hole — along with monitoring of fish populations to help inform fishing policy.
“All those programs get shut down, and so we no longer have that canary in the coal mine that’s giving us an indicator of the health of not just the park, not just the ecosystem, but the place we live,” Galipeau said.
Galipeau said he was especially worried about smaller or less-visited parks like Manzanar National Historic Site — concerns echoed by that park’s former superintendent, Bernadette Johnson. Manzanar’s remote location in the Eastern Sierra doesn’t have onsite worker housing, and the park was already only open four days a week due to lack of staffing and budget.
“Small parks like Manzanar really can’t afford to lose any other bodies at all,” Johnson said. “It’s already been bare bones.”
She noted that it’s not just the parks that will lose income, including entrance fees, during the shutdown: Bookstores, coffee shops, and even nearby towns will all lose out on dollars while parks are closed. But Galipeau said that the current shutdown plan, which prioritizes keeping parks that can collect entrance fees open, is a dangerous game, too. “Now all of a sudden, we’re letting money drive everything,” he said.
Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, Galipeau said, it’s been especially hard to find out what the plans for national parks are — and what the future might hold. “In the past, you could talk to people more openly,” he said. “You could understand what their shutdown plans were.”
“It’s very hard to get anybody to talk to us,” he said. “Because they don’t know what’s going to happen to them if they’ll be perceived as non-loyalists.”
This story contains reporting by KQED’s Keith Mizuguchi and Carly Severn
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