With few rangers around to catch them, a couple snowmobilers rode along the boardwalk fronting Old Faithful on Sunday/Kurt Repanshek file photo

With few rangers around to watch, some snowmobilers went illegally out of their way in Yellowstone National Park on Sunday, with a couple cruising the boardwalk fronting Old Faithful and several others riding two-stroke machines in the park, Superintendent Dan Wenk said.

How the general public would respond to national parks being open with few rangers on staff while the government shutdown lasted was a concern to some.

During the last shutdown, in October 2013, there were some mischief-makers, including a writer for Road & Track magazine's website who tooled around a closed Great Smoky Mountains National Park on a dirtbike and wrote A 250cc middle finger to the government shutdown: Civil Disobedience on Two Wheels. And then there was another scofflaw who climbed to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park and camped there so he could get nighttime photos for his Instagram following.

While most of the National Park Service staff remained on furlough Monday pending the end of the government shutdown, reports were beginning to trickle in about misbehaving visitors. 

“We had a commercial (snowmobile) guide who told a couple of his clients that they could get around the visitor center and get on the boardwalk between the visitor center and Old Faithful,” Superintendent Wenk said during a phone call. "They were on the boardwalk. I have no knowledge of any resource damage, and I don’t think there was any. They were not in the thermal basin, they were on the boardwalk.”

The guide was cited, according to the superintendent, who declined to identify the concessionaire involved.

Elsewhere in the park, said Superintendent Wenk, “(T)here were a bunch of two-stroke engines (which are banned in Yellowstone) that got in the park a little ways. We stopped them and turned them around.”

Meanwhile, some retired Park Service personnel were concerned that keeping the parks open with skeleton NPS crews could be used as evidence that more park operations could be turned over to the private sector.

"It negates any real closure and substantiates the notion that parks don't need the National Park Service to run or protect them," said Rob Arnbarger, who worked for more than three decades for the Park Service, and held jobs including regional director of the Alaska parks and superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. "They can be run more effectively by private, commercial entities not subject to congressional inaction. Whether it was intended or not, keeping parks open for the economic sector has only validated the notion that privatized parks are a better management scheme than governmental management."

In New York, meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo committed $65,000 a day in state funding to keep the Statue of Liberty open during the government shutdown.

"The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom and opportunity for all, and it is a gross injustice that this administration's dysfunction caused it to shut down. When this administration tries to deport immigrants, when they close down the Statue of Liberty, they are attacking who we are," Governor Cuomo said.  "New York will always stand up for the core values that make our nation truly great. New York State will not allow the vitriol of Washington to close the Statue of Liberty.  Today I am proud to announce that New York State will keep the Statue of Liberty open. The federal government's dysfunction has tried to close it down symbolically. We will keep it open literally."