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.”
