'Honestly terrifying': Yosemite National Park is in chaos

Did you miss the part about hiring being frozen so that they cannot hire the several hundred seasonal workers that they would normally be hiring now to handle the summer load?

5% of total staff mostly frontline crew, could cause chaos. Especially if under staffed already.

It will if they are at 150% of 2022 attendance (which they were in 2024).

Point me towards any company and order me to lay off 5% of individuals up to my own personal discretion and I guarantee you I can find a way to break it.

It can be that they were already understaffed in 2022. You aren't making the pat argument you want to be making.

The problem is for sure much deeper: chronic underfunding meets up with a surge in demand. That is the story of the National Parks since 2020.

When I visited Glacier in 2019, rangers there told me the park was nearly at capacity. The parking lot at Logan Pass was full by 8am every day. They were hoping to convert Going To The Sun Road to bus-only, the way Zion did. But I took the bus one day and the wait was over an hour. Not enough buses and not enough drivers. And that was before the post-COVID surge in visitors.

Or institute a mandatory reservation system, the way RMNP did. I used the reservation system at RMNP in 2023 and it worked fine. But even with reservations, the parking lot at Bear Lake was full before 7:30am on weekdays. Yosemite had a reservation system last summer… they cancelled for this year. It takes more staff to run.

The operational capacity of NPS was already in the red in popular parks; reducing staff in a haphazard way right now is not a smart solution to the well-known problems the parks are facing. It’s one of many hints that the team up top might be more interested in saying “we did something!” than actually understanding and addressing challenges.

where did you get this from, i didnt see it in the article?

So basically you're arguing that no important hires were made in the past three years? That feels...unlikely.

They also froze hiring:

> ...thousands of employees in the process of onboarding for federal agencies, including the Park Service, received emails stating that their job offers had been rescinded.

So they will be entering the busy season with staff cutbacks, understandably dismal morale, and none of the people they were in the process of hiring. Want government to run like a business? That's one solid strategy for tanking a business.

wait until ai staffing is rolled out.

The popular national parks like Yosemite do pay for themselves, so that’s how it works, it’s just run by the government instead of a corporation.

It also looks like it does pay for itself: https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/management/statistics.htm

> 2021 Operating Budget: Approximately $30 million > Park visitors: 3,343,988 (2021)

An entrance pass is $35 (per vehicle) or $20 (per person).

I imagine Yosemite, being one of the most popular National Parks, subsidizes the others.

That said, the National Parks are one of this nation's greatest accomplishments, and would be a bargain at 10x the cost. Trump (or rather his sycophants) would rather see them collapse as further "proof" of government as a failure, and to open the lands up to private resource extraction, like logging, mining and drilling.

The short answer is that national parks are not a self-contained business, they are held in trust for all Americans. Very high entry fees would violate that trust by excluding most citizens. So they are primarily supported by taxes, as they should be.

Parks do generate a ton of economic activity, but directly capture little of it. Airfare, gas, lodging, meals, retail sales, social media revenue, etc. mostly happen outside the parks. Like the highway system or national defense, they are a national platform that is federally maintained.

All that said, a national park is fundamentally not an economic concept. It satisfies a national desire that is deeper than just making a bit of money. The economic story is just another way of saying that tons of people love the parks.

Who said something about revenue and expenses?

They are just firing people arbitrary and claim fighting bureaucracy and corruption.

Or just open it up to the entire Internet [1].

[1] https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/the-doge-website-is-s...

You say that, but a private company already manages the reservation system, and profits off of all the junk fees

Those are actually difficult hires to make. Huge number of low-quality applicants, but the standards for park employees are actually quite high, and admin tries to hire for passion which helps with retention and sustaining their unique culture (imo park staff are by and large excellent folks and most have impressive backgrounds relative to their position.) The immediately tangible upshot to this approach is retention, lots of those "booth jockeys" return many years in a row, or grow into admin/ranger roles.

Staff morale and visitor experience will suffer if the careful selection process is eased, and retention woes will probably cause a measurable fiscal impact to operational budgets once the passion-hire cohort churns out.

Selecting for passion takes time. It's the same when you're hiring to build a company with an exceptional culture.

They are not going to privatize management - they are going to sell the land so the federal government does not own it anymore and give it to themselves in the form of tax breaks, subsidies to regime friendly companies.