The nationwide recognition of Olympic National Park was manifested a couple of summers ago in Port Angeles by the lineup of folks waiting to receive backcountry camping permits. A friend of mine, Grays Harbor born and raised, issued permits and bear resistant food containers. With a knowledge of the park equaling Billy Graham’s of the Bible, he briefed out-of-state visitors on its attractions.
Not this summer.
Due to the Trump regime’s federal hiring freeze, more than 2,000 seasonal staff have received notice that their hiring has been revoked. An additional 1,000-plus probationary workers have seen their hopes for permanent employment put in limbo.
The National Park Service has understaffed to begin with. Staff is down twenty percent from 2010 while visitation is up by an equal amount. The park system recorded 325 million visits in 2024. So popular is Mount Rainier that NPS has instituted a reservation system for car traffic in addition to backcountry camping.
The Park Service relies on seasonals— 175 at Mount Rainier–to handle summer and fall visitor loads. “The NPS hires roughly 8,000 seasonal employees for 3—6 months: (They) provide much of the basic visitor services from fee collection to interpretation to search and rescue,” explained Obama-era National Park Service director Jon Jarvis.
A letter signed by twenty-two United States Senators to recently-confirmed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sums up likely impacts:
Without seasonal staff during this peak season, visitor centers may close, bathrooms will be filthy, campgrounds may close, guided tours will be cut back or sltogether canceled, emergency response time will drop and visitor services like safety advice, trail recommendations and interpretation will be unavailable.
But park visitors and summer rangers aren’t the only folks feeling the Trump cuts.
Consider the recreation-dependent gateway towns.
Parks have not always been welcomed by neighbors. The Olympic Peninsula’s loggers have long beefed that rain forests of the Bogachiel and Hoh Rivers were “locked up” in the park. Lines of logging trucks and beefy, beet-faced county commissioners vociferously protested the creation of the North Cascades National Park.
At one Bellingham hearing, a nabob from the Puget Sound Pulp & Timber Co., echoing a line from The Seattle Times, characterized park advocates as “mountain climbers and birdwatchers.” To which a local Explorer Scout leader had this rejoinder:
You‘re the bird watcher, mister. The bird you’re watching is the eagle on the dollar bill.
Our national parks have bestowed economic benefits from Kensington in Alaska to Port Angeles to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge (home of Dollywood) in Tennessee.
Using government figures, Senator Maria Cantwell has pegged the annual value of our state’s recreation economy at $26.5 billion supporting 121,000 direct jobs. As an example, Olympic National Park welcomed almost three million visitors in 2023, generating $274 million in visitor spending and supporting 2,990 jobs for local communities.
The income to hotels and campgrounds came to almost $100 million.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited in America, generated $2.2 billion and supported 33,000 jobs in North Carolina and Tennessee. The benefits include $1 billion spent on hotels and $489 million spent by visitors in restaurants.
In Washington, the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area boasts a booming houseboat economy plus campgrounds and visitor facilities from Grand Coulee Dam to the Canadian border. The total economic benefit comes to $59 million in visitor spending and support for 676 jobs. The dollars are badly needed. Ferry and Stevens Counties, both deeply Republican bastions, are hurting economically.
The oligarchs running our federal government are largely oblivious to these benefits. And they lack the public spirit which led the Rockefellers to buy up land for Grand Teton National Park and donate it to the people of the United States.
I once reported from the Tetons and spent a day in Jackson with a retired rancher named Jake Kittle. He took me past multimillion dollar homes, observing:
The rich don’t come here for the scenery. They come here to be rich.
The Trump resign or-else message to federal workers is particularly insulting to park employees. It invites them to leave “lower productivity jobs” in government for “higher productivity jobs” in the private sector that will better serve the economy.
Tell that to Mount Rainier climbing rangers, or search and rescue teams who find lost hikers in the Olympics. Or play the laziness card to the intensely motivated crew at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in a remote corner of New Mexico.
Park rangers are our most trusted federal employees, and national parks are America’s gift to the world. In the words of Theresa Pierno, CEO of the National Parks Conservation Assocation:
Americans love our national parks, and want to see them protected. But to do that, we must also protect the people who care for these places.
What is to be done? Senator Murray and Cantwell are sounding the alarm, but press statements and letters won’t stop Elon Musk’s wrecking crew or “Death Star” OMB Director Russell Vought. The people, as owners, must act to save their parks.
How? How ‘bout getting on Republican politicians who are trying to keep our minds focused on “woke” ideology and transgender teenagers? Instead of focusing on manufactured talk show issues, confront them with a real one.
Blustery State Representative Jim Walsh, Washington’s State Republican Party chairman, represents Grays Harbor County, southern gateway to Olympic Park. New U.S. Representative Mike Baumgartner represents counties flanking the Roosevelt NRA.
The Great Smoky Mountains gateway towns are represented by Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Trump-Vance cheerleader and possibly the dumbest member of the world’s greatest deliberative body. Blackburn’s constituents surely remember, even if she does not, the devastating fire that came down to destroy part of Gatlinburg, burning 2,450 structures, causing $2 billion in damage and killing fourteen people.
The Trump regime now stupidly wants to slash the firefighting budget. A lot of Republican recreation gateway towns may suffer the consequences. The old Republican “Drill Baby Drill” moniker will in reality be “Burn, Baby Burn.”