When the government’s away, Yosemite National Park becomes a lawless free-for-all. Since the latest federal shutdown kicked off on October 1, a skeleton crew of park staff has been left to deal with a flood of tourists acting like laws are optional if no one’s around to enforce them.
As reported by The Travel, Yosemite National Park, in particular, is being overrun by people taking full advantage of there being no one around to tell them no.
The National Park Service’s contingency plan during shutdowns is to toss out the bare minimum number of staff and send everyone else home. The visitor center doors are locked, and tours have been canceled. But trails, roads, and campgrounds are wide open. This is the perfect environment for someone to, say, illegally base jump off El Capitan.
Not to be outdone, permitless hikers are swarming Half Dome’s infamous cables, one of the most dangerous, usually regulated, trails in the park. Normally, permits cap traffic to keep the trail from becoming a logjam. But with enforcement spotty at best, people are treating the shutdown like a golden ticket to hike without restriction and at their own risk.
The shutdown has created a legion of campground squatters who, with no reservation system to check them in or out, are just not leaving. It all sounds like freewheeling fun; a lot of mice playing as the cat is away kind of stuff.
The Travel reports that conservationists are worried, as they are flashing back to the 2018-2019 shutdown, when Joshua Tree National Park was similarly overrun by people taking full advantage of park staff having been sent home to wonder where their next paycheck was going to come from. The sudden flood of lawlessness wrecked Joshua Tree, as visitors chopped down trees and thoroughly trampled centuries of natural growth in about a month. Park Rangers worry that Yosemite might be next.
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