What Is the Government Shutdown Doing to Yosemite?

When Santa Rosa resident Sean Jennings arrived at Yosemite National Park last week on a weekday during the ongoing government shutdown, he was shocked by how busy the park was: “There were people everywhere,” he said.

Jennings had planned a leaf peeping trip through the Sierra with his daughter Sugar and had reserved one night’s stay in Yosemite itself at Porcupine Flats campground, near Tioga Pass.

As frequent visitors to national parks, Jennings said he and his daughter were surprised to find bumper-to-bumper traffic, full parking lots and piled-up garbage — especially for a Monday in October. He also reported “a general undercurrent of, I wouldn’t say hostility, but unease” among their fellow visitors.

And on top of it all, when the family pulled into their campground, with no rangers around to check in campground guests and enforce bookings, there was somebody already set up in the spot that they had reserved and paid for weeks ago.

Jennings said the person did politely pack up and leave when confronted. But overall, “there was definitely a level of brusqueness” to most of his interactions with other visitors in the park, he said.

“It didn’t feel as welcoming, as open as it has in the past for us,” he said. “It felt disorganized and had sort of a ‘first-come-first-serve,’ ‘screw you’ type of feeling to it.”

Unlike other national parks, Yosemite has remained open during the federal government shutdown, albeit with a drastically reduced workforce. And more than two weeks in, with many of their workers off the job, national parks are starting to feel the effects of the federal government shutdown.

While some say reports of unpermitted activity at Yosemite National Park are overblown, others say an uptick in visitors has been significant and noticeable – so much that they’re worried about the long-term effects not just on the park, but on the behavior of future park visitors.

‘Eerie’ in the Valley

Mark Rose, Sierra Nevada program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, visited Yosemite late last week and said most things appeared normal. For the most part, the bathrooms he saw were clean, and the trash had been taken out, and a volunteer was even on duty as his campground host. But the park had an “eerie” feel, Rose said.

“It almost felt like you showed up to class and none of the teachers were there,” he said. “I didn’t see a single National Park Service employee — not a single ranger wearing a ranger suit, walking around or helping visitors.”

That’s because most park rangers, particularly “interpretive rangers” — those that share park information with the public — have been furloughed during the shutdown.

In the interim, volunteers and employees from the nonprofit Yosemite Conservancy are staffing a single welcome center in the Valley. But all other visitor centers and museums, as well as the park entrance kiosks, are closed. There are no ranger programs, no maps being handed out and some Yosemite campgrounds don’t even have a volunteer making sure that reservations are being honored — or that people are storing their food away from bears and other wildlife.

Many weekend visitors to Yosemite posting to Reddit reported that, like Rose, they saw nothing out of the ordinary in the park during the shutdown. But nonetheless, Rose said, just one bad actor can have a major impact — and with staffing already down this year in national parks, added to President Donald Trump’s threats to cut even more employees during the shutdown, Rose is worried about the bigger picture.

“We saw before the shutdown and during the shutdown, we don’t have adequate levels of staffing to protect visitors and protect resources,” Rose said. “The concern is the longer this drags on, the more of these impacts we’re going to continue to see.”

Short on staff

As the shutdown loomed in late September, a group of former national parks superintendents sounded the alarm about the effect that keeping parks open without full staff could have.

With so many of their colleagues off the job, the few people deemed essential and still working in Yosemite — including fire and search-and-rescue crews — are under strain. One federal worker in the park, who spoke to KQED on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation and losing their job, said the park has been busy, “like all the time,” since the shutdown, with visitorship more resembling the park’s summer peaks.

“There’s nobody to stop them at the gate,” they said. With nobody on duty to collect entrance fees, “everybody knows that it’s free, so they’re just coming.” KQED reached out to Yosemite National Park representatives for comment, but received no response.

Also still working are law enforcement rangers, essentially the police at parks, but Elisabeth Barton, founding member and CEO of tour company Echo Adventure Cooperative, said they are doing “double duty,” as they attempt to enforce rules that visitors were never apprised of.

Barton, whose group guides trips in Yosemite and Stanislaus National Forest, described the scene in Yosemite during the last two weeks as “wild.”

Barton said she fears the shutdown has actually attracted a more “aggressive” type of visitor — one that saw that parks would be open but unstaffed, and decided to come anyway. And for some, to take the opportunity to do an activity that’s normally banned or requires a permit.

The soaring popularity of climbing as a sport, which is in one of its peak seasons in the park, may explain the lines she’s seen during the shutdown at popular Yosemite routes like “The Nose” of El Capitan, she said. And while you’ll find people doing unpermitted things in the park all year round, Barton said, she thinks people have gotten more bold — BASE jumping off cliffs without a permit in broad daylight and flying drones, an activity that’s banned in national parks — knowing there aren’t enough staff to enforce the rules.

Members of her guiding company have “been trying to do our part and just remind people that [drones are] illegal, and they do not care,” she said. “And they have told us such.”

“This past weekend felt like the Fourth of July, it was so busy,” the anonymous park worker said — and is especially concerned about the unchecked visitor behavior they’ve witnessed during the shutdown. “There are so many people parked all over the place, parked in the dirt, parked on plants and other resources.”

In the campgrounds themselves, “there’s definitely been an uptick in people squatting,” they said — just like the Jennings family encountered at Porcupine Flats.

A bad standard

The Yosemite shutdown crowds have Barton feeling “very conflicted,” she said. On the one hand, her co-op’s guiding business, hotel and outdoor shop have thrived during this period. “It’s incredibly beneficial to my company to have the shutdown when it’s happening, because the shoulder season is now busier than it’s ever been,” she said.

And Barton believes everyone should experience the beauty of national parks, especially those who’ve never been to one before.

“But at the same time, I’m seeing unprecedented damage to my park,” she said. And while the number of people actually breaking the rules — intentionally or unintentionally — may be relatively small, Barton worries that bad actors are setting a particularly bad example for those first-time visitors, who may build undesirable habits and cause damage at parks in the future.

“There is a standard being set for a national park visitor — the folks who would never dare pull a drone out of their vehicle because it’s just against the rules and they know it,” she said. “While they’re in the park, they’re seeing all these drones moving and they’re like, ‘You know what, maybe it’s not that big of a deal?’”

The anonymous park worker said there’s not much they can do to stop the behavior. Law enforcement is generally too busy to ticket everyone, and they’re skeptical they’ll receive word of changes from park leadership anytime soon. “Information is not being disseminated,” they said — and the leadership above them “doesn’t know anything.”

Rose, too, worries this may just be the start of bigger impacts for national parks.

“The last shutdown was 35 days,” he said. “And it wasn’t until we got about 3 weeks into it that you really started to see some of the impacts.”