Illegal camping at Death Valley National Park is one visible impact of the ongoing government shutdown. What isn't seen by the public could be more long lasting/Basin and Range Watch

Sinking morale among the National Park Service ranks and accumulating human waste and garbage are just some of the symptoms of the ongoing government shutdown that has left many national parks open but without adequate staffing.

Not so visible are the impacts being suffered in long-term environmental monitoring, work on visitor management plans and environmental impact statements, and even potential setbacks to the hiring of next summer's seasonal rangers.

"It just sounds like, to be honest, the partial shutdown was well-intentioned, but it’s not working very well and it's impacting the parks,” Frank Dean, president and CEO of the Yosemite Conservancy, said during a call Thursday. "It was simpler before when it was all closed, so I don’t know if this experiment makes a lot of sense, particularly as it gets protracted.”

Since the National Park Service was told to keep as many units of the National Park System open as possible, but only with essential personnel, many have struggled with skeleton contingents of law enforcement rangers. With no maintenance crews to collect trash or maintain restrooms, and no budget to pay for outside help, many parks have been blighted by litter and human waste. There have been reports of illegal off-road travel, metal detecting on battlefields in the park system, and damage to resources. Dean told of a visitor to Yosemite who hiked the Vernal Fall Trail with his dog, something that's illegal. Then there were families who brought their kids with their sleds into the park, pulled onto the side of snow-covered roads, and let the kids sled down the road.

Those issues are just the most visible impacts to the parks. What isn't seen by the general public could be more damaging. While the messes being left behind can be cleaned up, long-range planning is being delayed and scientific research is being pelted with information gaps.

"It all just grinds to a halt," former Park Service Director Jon Jarvis said Thursday when asked about all the planning work that is done year-round throughout the system. "I think there are a number of things that are not very obvious to the general public, like the trash and toilets (are), that are pretty consequential when you have a shutdown. I’ve been talking to some of my former colleagues about things like the long-term inventory monitoring sites that are incredibly important to understanding ecosystems, and particularly climate change. These things require regular data collection, and if you interrupt that data collection with a blank, you basically bifurcate that data set into two datasets or more, and undermine its scientific relevancy and credibility.

"... And, of course, some of them are extraordinarily important to happen at a particular moment, if you’re trying to capture plant phenology or migration of a species, or whatever," he added. "Seasonality change in water temperature, where you want to get that data point at the same time every time every year. And we’re basically missing that at the moment." 

Halting work on plans for managing crowds at Arches and other national parks could impact the summer travel season/NPS

Planning work in parks such as Acadia, Arches, and Zion on how best to manage visitor traffic also has been stalled by the shutdown, 

"Indeed, important planning, monitoring, research, and maintenance will be short-changed by having these vital NPS staffers on the sidelines for any period of time," said Friends of Acadia President and CEO David MacDonald. "As you know, FOA is extremely concerned about issues like climate change, rapidly-growing visitation, and deferred maintenance backlog, and the park’s ability to meet these challenges will be hampered by the shutdown."

Unlike parks such as Yosemite, Big Bend, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, and Rocky Mountain, winter is definitely the slow season at Acadia. Still, the locals in the surrounding towns love the winter months and enjoy snowy days in the park.

"More folks might feel the immediate impacts of the shutdown as more winter weather moves in – snowfall today will close the Ocean Drive and all parking lots at trailheads which have been open and easy to use for the past 10 days," pointed out MacDonald.  "More snow is in the forecast for next week, and (FOA) members will be surprised and unhappy, I think, if our volunteer crews are not able to go out and groom cross-country ski trails."

At Great Smoky, the Great Smoky Mountains Association paid to keep the visitor centers open for a while, but that ended on New Year's Day.

"The money we were able to donate was the net proceeds we thought we could earn by operating our in-park bookstores during the holiday (Dec. 22 through Jan. 1) period," said Laurel Rematore, the association's CEO. "That is in fact how it played out; we had the sales volume we expected, so we were able to cover our expenses as well as the NPS expenses. We are not in a position to donate more without diverting money from GSMA or park planned programs, or from GSMA operating reserves that are intended to protect GSMA’s employees and the organization from just this situation."

How long the shutdown drags on will determine whether other efforts will be made to support the park's visitors, she said.

"There are discussions starting in the business community about the feasibility of funding park visitor center operations over Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend, which would be the next big surge of tourist activity for Sevier County (where Gatlinburg is), but no firm plans that I know of," Rematore said. "I’m sure they will also be looking at the Valentine’s Day through Presidents Day weekend too; since Gatlinburg has been recognized as a wedding capital of the U.S. (at one time second only to Las Vegas, or so the local lore goes), Valentine’s Day tends to be really big in these parts."

At Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, there is no funding to maintain snowmobile and cross-country ski trails, monitor ice conditions and pressure ridges, plow roads, or help keep visitor facilities staffed for public programs. Research projects and education programs are in limbo.

"Even if Voyageurs is technically still accessible, a government shutdown is never good news for our national parks. Voyageurs and all our parks are underfunded and under-staffed already," said Christina Hausman, executive director of Voyageurs National Park Association. "It’s frustrating to see Park Service staff dealing with income uncertainty. We need them; there’s a lot of work to be done, not only to preserve places like Voyageurs but to ensure public safety."

If the shutdown lingers on into next week, the association plans to provide funding to the park for some operations, such as visitor center operations and visitor safety.

Big Bend National Park could soon get help cleaning up day-use areas from the surrounding tourism community/NPS

Down in West Texas, the tourism community around Big Bend National Park was mulling the possibility of donating to cover custodial services at the park's day-use areas. However, park officials said any funds that materialize could not be used to open campgrounds.

"With the continued absense of a viable reservation system due to the shutdown, it would have required more ranger staffing to manage the overnight use in the campgrounds," said Superintendent Bob Krumenaker.

"Opening restrooms in day-use areas of the park makes more sense, and can be sustained with limited staff," he said. "Big Bend rangers, and other rangers around the NPS, are the unsung heroes during the shutdown, and their safety is not something we will compromise."

County officials are expected to take up the matter next week.

What could prove to be an unintended consequence of overflowing trash bins as the shutdown continues is wildlife habituation to human foods. Sequoia National Park and neighboring Kings Canyon National Park closed entirely Wednesday night because of human waste issues and trash that was being spread around by wildlife looking for meals. 

"One of the concerns that a couple of my colleagues talked about is that we spent absolutely decades weaning the bears of Yosemite from human food, and that was a concerted effort to making sure there was proper garbage disposal, food storage," Jarvis said. "You get information when you get there about not leaving your cooler in the backseat of your car and all of that. All of that has gone out the window, and there is garbage all piled up in trash cans throughout Yosemite. That could easily result in a habituated bear that could result in a human-bear encounter" that could end with the bear ultimately being euthanized."

Five years ago, during the October 2013 shutdown that last 16 days, all parks were closed initially. A handful later were allowed to open when states promised to pick up the tab. After the government got back to work, Jarvis, as the Park Service director, was called into an hours-long joint hearing of the House Oversight and Natural Resources committees. A smug, biting, and sarcastic roster of Republicans bashed Jarvis over how the Park Service handled the closure of the park system.

The former Park Service director recalled that hearing Thursday.

“I think their motivation for leaving the parks open (this time) was to avoid the public outcry that they received during the last shutdown. The national parks were the public face of the shutdown," said Jarvis. "I got grilled on the hill for five hours over it, and being accused that closing them was a political act. And I vehemently disagreed with that, that it was a stewardship act, that we felt that without the employees there to manage and provide stewardship, that the parks would be vulnerable to impact.

"I think we’re actually seeing that play out now.”