Jacob Moore / For Nisqually Valley News
While visitors are still plentiful at Mount Rainier National Park during the current federal shutdown, spotting a park ranger or National Parks Service vehicle feels similar to the excitement of spotting a wild deer or other wildlife.
As of Thursday, Mount Rainier National Park remained completely open to the public despite the more than two-week long government shutdown, with some exceptions for seasonal closures.
While entrance gates remain open, the buildings nearby that are usually filled with staff are dark. The usual welcoming doors to visitor centers are closed with not a soul inside.
The U.S. federal government entered into a partial shutdown Oct. 1. As the money has stopped flowing, federal employees have been furloughed and federal agencies from air traffic control to national parks management are operated by skeleton crews. Ahead of the shutdown, advocates for the county’s national parks urged the government to shut the gates during the funding shortage over concerns of increased risks and damage due to understaffing.
Many who spoke out were former park rangers, National Parks Service superintendents and other experienced professionals, but even with that experience, the question remains: how real are those concerns?
To find out how the shutdown might impact the park that sits right in Lewis County’s backyard, CT Publishing made the trip east through the southwest entrance and up to the Paradise Visitor Center.
During the visit, two journalists from CT Publishing spotted two national parks employees, even stopping one on the side of the road. One staff member seemed to be working in custodial services keeping bathrooms and other facilities clean while the other drove a park ranger vehicle.
Both staffers declined to speak with The Chronicle, with one citing concerns for their job and the other stating that all requests for comment or information would need to go through the National Parks Service communications team. No other employees were available. The entrance gate to the park as well as information points, small museums and the Paradise Visitors Center were all shuttered.
One experienced hiker stopped to talk and shared a bit of what he had seen on the Skyline Trail Loop, which is accessible from the Paradise Visitors Center parking lot. Paul Barach is an experienced hiker from Tacoma who has visited the Paradise area and nearby trails regularly in the past. After a hike on Thursday afternoon, he said the most concerning thing he saw in the park since the shutdown was visitors — unprepared for the hike they were on — frequently wandering off trails into the fragile mountain prairie ecosystem.
“Here I didn’t see a lot of trash,” Barach said. “I saw a lot of people just wandering off trail though, which I tried to tell them, don’t do that. Because it’s very fragile alpine meadows. You’ll damage them. But I think people just don’t know and you don’t have rangers here to educate people.”
Barach said he hasn’t seen any major impacts of the current shutdown in the park yet other than closed visitor centers and very few rangers. He did say he has heard about issues with garbage and littering on other trails, but he didn’t notice any trash or debris on the trail he hiked. He added that his main concerns going forward would be a lack of rangers in the winter if the shutdown continues that long.
“What worries me is if this shutdown continues through the winter,” Barach said. “You’re going to have no one telling people about avalanche danger. That’s going to be a huge issue because if people are trying to get up to Camp Muir or even hiking up to Panorama and don’t know about avalanche slopes it could be bad. And then you’ve got no one around to rescue them.”
According to the National Parks Contingency Plan, which was released before the start of the current shut down, the agency was expected to furlough more than half of its current employees nationwide. Of the 14,500 employees employed by the agency, 9,296 provided non-essential services.
In the same document, the agency identified nearly 3,000 necessary employees that would continue to work in the agency’s national headquarters, regional offices and in the parks themselves. According to the contingency plan, remaining staff fall into two categories, exempted and excepted.
Exempted staff are funded through remaining funding sources. Excepted staff can seemingly continue working without a specific funding source to perform essential duties. The number of exempted or excepted staff remaining in Mount Rainier National Park is currently unclear.
“Due to the dramatic differences in accessibility, operations, size, visitation, location and infrastructure represented in national park sites, the number of employees required to carry out the excepted activities defined above will vary from site to site,” reads the contingency plan. “Excepted staffing will be held to the amount needed for the protection of life, property and public health and safety, and will be based on the assumption that the NPS is conducting no park operations and providing no visitor services.”
