Long lines and canceled rentals: Firings bring chaos to national parks

At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.

The wait to enter Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park this past weekend was twice as long as usual after the administration let go four employees who worked at the south entrance, where roughly 90 % of the park’s nearly 5 million annual visitors pass through.

And at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, last week’s widespread layoffs gutted the team that managed reservations for renting historic farmhouses. Visitors received notifications that their reservations had been canceled indefinitely.

President Donald Trump’s purge of federal employees is not only upending the lives of National Park Service workers, but also threatening to harm the visitor experience at national parks across the country. The problems are expected to escalate during the summer season, when more than 100 million Americans and international tourists typically visit the 63 national parks in the United States.

“It’s chaos everywhere,” said Kristin Jenn, a former seasonal park ranger at Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve. “I don’t know what the next couple of months are going to bring.”

As part of a directive to fire most trial and probationary staff across the federal government, the Park Service on Friday terminated roughly 1,000 probationary employees, in what some are calling a “Valentine’s Day massacre.”

This account of how the firings are disrupting national parks is based on interviews and messages with more than a dozen current and former Park Service workers, as well as park advocates.

Asked for comment, a Park Service spokesperson said in an email, “The National Park Service is working closely with the Office of Personnel Management to ensure we are prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people. As always, NPS will continue to provide critical services and deliver excellent customer service.”

The layoffs have rippled across the government, affecting the federal response to everything from natural disasters to infectious-disease outbreaks. But some of their most tangible impacts could be felt in national parks, popular travel destinations that saw more than 325 million visits in 2023.

Nate Vince, Yosemite National Park’s fired locksmith, said he found out about his termination three weeks before the end of his probationary period. The 42-year-old said he worries about not only his career prospects, but also the safety and security of park visitors and workers.

Yosemite, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island, has hundreds of locked buildings and gates. Sometimes visitors get locked inside vault toilets or restrooms. Sometimes employees get locked out of their houses in the middle of the night.

“We have a federal court, administrative buildings, toilets, closets, gun safes,” said Vince, who started working as a permanent employee at the park in March after four years as a seasonal employee. “We have endless things that need to be secured in various forms, and I’m the sole keeper of those keys, the one that makes the keys, the one that fixes the locks, installs the locks, and has all that knowledge of the security behind the park. And so it’s a critical role. And without it, everyone else in the park is handicapped.”

The firings add to persistent staffing challenges at the Park Service, whose workforce has declined by 15% since 2010, according to federal data. Over that same period, the data shows, park visitation has increased by 16% .

“We saw 30,000 visits a day – that’s half the size of a Taylor Swift concert,” said Jeff Mow, who served as superintendent of Glacier National Park from 2013 to 2022. “How are you going to manage that with a skeleton staff?”

Bill Wade, a former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park who serves as executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, said the fired staffers’ absence will be felt throughout the parks. At the entrances, where they collected admission fees and doled out maps and warm welcomes. At the visitor centers, where they recommended adventures based on hikers’ interests and endurance levels. On the trails, where they led walks, blending an encyclopedic knowledge of history and ecology with engaging yarns. And even in the restrooms, where they tidied up the facilities, emptying the trash and restocking the toilet paper.

The firings, Wade and others said, could cause disruptions reminiscent of the coronavirus pandemic and recent government shutdowns. Visitor centers and campgrounds could close or reduce their hours. Garbage could spill out of overfilled bins. Litter could sully nature trails.

“Some of the effects could be immediate, but the bulk of the impacts will occur in the heavy season, which for many national parks is May to September,” said Wade, who worked for the Park Service for more than three decades.

At least one park, however, has seen immediate impacts. During Presidents’ Day weekend, lines of cars waited at the southern entrance to Grand Canyon National Park for an hour and a half, said Jim Landahl, a fired probationary worker there.

“That’s double the typical time it takes to get into the park,” he said. “And that’s directly because we were understaffed because four of the rangers who work at the entrance received termination notices.”

Several other fired employees at the Grand Canyon were working to replace a 12.5-mile pipeline that provides water for all facilities on the park’s South Rim, including some shower and laundry facilities, Landahl said. The pipeline was built in the 1960s and “experiences frequent failures,” according to the park’s website, with more than 85 major breaks since 2010.

Despite its name, the Park Service also manages 87 national monuments across the country. Some probationary employees at national monuments were also fired Friday, although the total number is unclear.

Brian Gibbs, 41, who was working as a ranger at Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeast Iowa, said his termination was “traumatic” and “absolutely upended” his life. He said his wife, who is pregnant with their second child, will be kicked off his health insurance next week, raising the cost of her regular OB/GYN appointments.

Besides the effects on his family, Gibbs said, he worries about the effects on the local students he had been teaching and hosting on field trips at Effigy Mounds, which is home to more than 200 Native American ceremonial and burial mounds. At the time of his firing, he had been helping to teach elementary and middle school science students about the importance of protecting public lands and the natural world.

“Public lands are places where we can all come together and learn about past and present cultures,” Gibbs said. “They are one of our greatest gifts.”