What’s the Trump Administration’s End Game for the National Parks?

If headlines are any indication, at no point in recent history has the American public been more obsessed with the toilets in their national parks. It began with the news, in April, of Yosemite scientists “forced to clean bathrooms.” By June, the summer staffing crunch was hitting parks “from research to restrooms.” By late August, visitors were “overwhelming Glacier National Park’s toilets.” And in October, the specter of “appalling toilets” loomed once more as parks were ordered to stay open during the ongoing government shutdown.

But as I peered into a porcelain bowl in Yosemite Valley at 9 a.m. on the Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend, I saw a john that was not “unkept” but in fact white, empty, and blameless. The seat was up, suggesting a recent scrubdown. The scent of cleaning products filled the air. 

Other park visitors were assessing the cans favorably that day, too. I know because they told me so: on the crowded Mist Trail to Vernal Fall, at the peeling and historic Ahwahnee Hotel, and at the teeming Upper Pines campground. Cleanish loos were invariably among the evidence cited by visitors when they told me the park at least appeared to be doing okay, despite what they’d heard on the news.

Since January 20, 2025, the National Park Service has lost a significant portion of its workforce due to downsizing by the Trump administration—as high as 24 percent, according to internal staffing data reviewed by RE:PUBLIC and Outside. Despite this, an April order from Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum mandated that reductions to operating hours or visitor services, including trails and campgrounds, must be reviewed by Washington. Then, during the October government shutdown, parks were ordered to stay partially open while nearly 9,300 employees were furloughed and the Interior Department prepared plans to fire hundreds of them.

Yosemite was already shorthanded this summer, with just three of its 11 dispatch positions filled and only six campground rangers—compared to 15 last year—to oversee the four campgrounds accommodating over 2,900 people in the bustling Valley, according to employees and those familiar with the park’s staffing situation. (All current employees spoke anonymously due to fear of retribution.) But before my visit, sources told me that I was unlikely to see much beyond the ordinary dysfunction inherent to running the equivalent of a small city that hosts around four million visitors annually. The administration, they said, was performing what one former NPS official called “facade management,” ensuring that visitor-facing services like fee stations, campgrounds, and yes, bathrooms, appeared to be functioning smoothly.

But, parks advocates say, these aren’t the vital signs that indicate the health of a national park. Experts who understand how parks actually work say they're in trouble. “Over the next three years or so, unless Congress steps in, the Park Service will be pretty seriously damaged, you might almost say dismantled,” says former NPS director Jonathan Jarvis, who served as the agency’s head from 2009 to 2017. 

“Over the next three years or so, unless Congress steps in, the Park Service will be pretty seriously damaged, you might almost say dismantled,” says former NPS director Jonathan Jarvis, who served as the agency’s head from 2009 to 2017. 

The Interior Department and Yosemite did not fulfill requests for interviews before the shutdown, and did not respond to detailed questions sent after. The White House could not be reached for comment during the shutdown.

To glean what the future of the park service might hold under the Trump administration, RE:PUBLIC and Outside spoke to dozens of current and former park service employees and experts. Many of them said that the administration’s impact on the national parks will be far more consequential than what visitors experienced this summer and fall. Yosemite offers a glimpse of that potential future—if you can see beyond the bathrooms.

Vernal Fall, like countless sights in Yosemite Valley, evokes a sentiment a friend once expressed, that the abundance of “unnecessary beauty” in the world led him to believe there must be a higher power. Even thronged by hikers, the fall inspires awe, a flawless sheet of water pouring over a granite cliff, exhaling a rainbow where it meets the river.

Yet, like countless sights in Yosemite Valley, Vernal Fall also evokes the feeling of being in nature Disneyland. People were everywhere on my hike. The air on the paved portion of the trail smelled of sunscreen. A sign reading Give Plants a Chance! had been kicked in two; beyond it, a social trail had been trampled out to a pile of rocks where hikers were taking selfies. A Shih Tzu tottered about off-leash, despite park rules prohibiting dogs off pavement.

In Secretary Doug Burgum’s view, Yosemite is a good park—one that attracts visitors and earns its keep. This was also how the Department of the Interior viewed national parks during Trump 1.0, the former NPS official, who I’ll call James, told me. “They’d look at the parks like they were a business: Yosemite gets X number of visitors, it's a winner.”

Losers, to use the parlance of Burgum’s boss, are parks like Knife River Indian Villages, a national historic site in the secretary’s home state of North Dakota. During a Senate appropriations meeting in May, Burgum advocated giving parks like Knife River back to the states as part of President Trump’s proposal to slash over a third of the NPS budget—$1.2 billion—in 2026. Gray-haired and hawkish, wearing an American flag pin on his lapel, the secretary spent the first 37 seconds of his six-minute opening remarks thanking the committee in a gravelly voice, before dedicating the next two minutes and 51 seconds to the Interior’s plans to extract resources like coal and rare earth minerals from America’s public lands, or what he called its “balance sheet.” When asked for a list of national park sites he planned to offload, he assured the Senate that he wouldn’t touch any of the 63 “crown jewels” with national park designations. But parks like Knife River, Burgum said, “have almost no visitors, they’re cost centers.” These are the liabilities he’d like to write off.

In dunking on Knife River and many of the 370 NPS units designated as national monuments, battlefields, historic sites, and otherwise, Burgum—who was a software executive before becoming North Dakota’s governor in 2016—failed to read the room, says Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the NPCA. “Every senator,” she said, Republican and Democrat, “has national park units in their state and loves going to them.”

Both the Senate and the House have rejected Trump’s billion-dollar budget cut. The Senate proposed an Interior appropriations bill that would hold the NPS budget even, and the House proposed a 6-plus percent cut to operations. But Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed July 4, has already clawed back an estimated $267 million of Inflation Reduction Act funding for parks. 

Whichever version of the budget eventually passes, the park service enters fiscal year 2026 significantly smaller and, advocates say, compromised in its ability to fulfill its mission. On January 28, federal employees received the now infamous “fork in the road” memo threatening possible reductions in force, or RIFs, the federal government's version of a layoff. Employees could stay and risk being fired, or they could take one of the government’s offers, which included early retirement for those eligible, or a deferred resignation program that essentially paid them to leave their jobs. Up to 1,800 NPS employees took the deferred resignations or lump-sum incentive payments to leave, and more than 800 have retired this year, according to internal data and communications. 

Former employees told me that they took these offers in part out of fear of otherwise being let go in a RIF, in which they worried they might lose the healthcare benefits or pensions they’d earned from years of service. With the offers, “at least you got something,” says a former NPS employee who retired after 25 years of service. In January, employees had nine days to decide; a second round in April gave workers just six. “It was psychological warfare,” says the former employee.

The incentives for early retirement meant that the park service likely lost a disproportionate number of its leaders, says Jesse Chakrin, a former ranger in Yosemite and Denali and the executive director of the nonprofit The Fund for People in Parks, which contributes to park projects. “No one has quantified this massive loss in institutional knowledge,” he says. 

The incentives for early retirement meant that the park service likely lost a disproportionate number of its leaders, says Jesse Chakrin, a former ranger in Yosemite. “No one has quantified this massive loss in institutional knowledge,” he says. 

The NPS did not fulfill most of our Freedom of Information Act requests, but some staffing figures are available. The agency currently has no Senate-confirmed director, only an acting director, its comptroller Jessica Bowron. Two of its three deputy directors, five of its seven regional directors, and five of its nine associate directors have left, according to a July organizational chart. Over 100 superintendent positions, including Yosemite’s, are also vacant or filled by acting superintendents, according to the NPCA. 

An ongoing federal hiring freeze signed by Trump on Inauguration Day means that these permanent positions haven't been rehired. Employees at Yosemite and other parks told me of workers covering two or three roles and working with no supervisors. The hiring of seasonal staff, which most parks depend on during their busiest months, was also delayed, so that just 4,500 of roughly 7,700 roles were filled as of July, according to the NPCA. For Yosemite, “seasonal hiring was a complete and total shitshow nightmare,” an employee I’ll call Rachel told me.

Meanwhile, beyond the deferred resignations and early retirements, NPS staff have endured multiple efforts to can them. On Valentine’s Day, 1,000 probationary employees were fired, only to have their jobs reinstated by court order in March. In April, NPS administrative roles like HR, contracting, and IT were consolidated into the Interior Department, with expectations of future downsizing. Plans to cut up to 1,500 NPS positions, according to leaked communications, were then delayed by back-and-forth in the courts. Now the White House is following through on the mass firings it threatened to conduct during the government shutdown. Court documents filed October 20 revealed Interior Department plans to lay off 2,050 employees, including at least 272 from the NPS. Those numbers could be even higher, as the government was only required to disclose intended cuts affecting certain unionized employees. The RIFs have been temporarily halted by a judge, but other NPS staff remain vulnerable to being fired.

As previously expected, the vast majority of the revealed RIFs were planned at NPS regional and support offices. In his May testimony to Congress, Burgum had suggested as much. “I want more people in the parks,” he said. “I want less overhead.”

“This is a complete misunderstanding of how parks operate,” says Jarvis, the former NPS director. Regional offices house specialists who work across multiple parks, like architects who consult when parks build new visitor centers and transportation specialists who help design new parking lots. “It's a highly efficient model.” Even large parks like Yosemite use these regional services, Jarvis says. “To suggest these people don't work in parks and we can get rid of them is just ridiculous.” 

Nonetheless, fears around RIFs had already led to an exodus from regional and support offices. The Pacific West regional offices in San Francisco and Seattle that support Yosemite and 64 other parks have lost approximately 50 employees since January, according to a source familiar with staffing. The October 20 court documents revealed plans to abolish another 57 of a stated 198 remaining positions.

Former park leaders say the cost-cutting argument doesn’t make sense. The park service budget represents less than a fifth of a percent of the federal budget. Yet it creates $56.3 billion in economic output, what advocates call a 16x return on investment. In 2024, visitors spent an estimated $29 billion in the gateway communities outside each park. “You’d think if you had a budget that’s less than 1 percent, that delivers that much economic benefit—why would you touch it?” asked David Vela, a former Grand Teton superintendent who served as an acting director of the park service under Trump 1.0. 

The headscratcher is this: the National Park Service enjoys rare bipartisan support, with a remarkable 76-percent approval rating across political lines, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Knowing this, Jesse Chakrin asks the billion-dollar question: 

“Why would you continue to undercut the functionality of the most popular agency in the government?”

If it weren’t for the rustic architecture or the granite monoliths in the backdrop, the hub of Curry Village could be in any American amusement park. Burly middle-aged men stroll by in cutoff tanks and Hawaiian shorts, and from within a group of twenty-somethings a woman shouts, “Look, there’s the bar!” at 2 p.m.  

The restaurants, gift shops, and lodging throughout Yosemite are run not by the park service, but by a $10.5 billion corporation called Aramark, which also provides food and facilities services to ballparks, prisons, hospitals, and other institutions. Aramark and concessioners Xanterra, Delaware North, and ExplorUS make up what park experts call “the big four” corporations that provide the majority of concessions in national parks, which can also include managing campgrounds, tours, and guiding services. Concessioners pay a franchise fee to the park—11.75 percent of revenues, in the case of Aramark and Yosemite—and in some cases represent a large portion of park operations. Last summer in Yosemite, park employees numbered 758, while Aramark employees numbered 1,271.

A leading theory among park service advocates and experts is that, as with other government agencies, the Trump administration is making the park service inept intentionally, in order to privatize more of its functions. Park service budget is “operational budget,” Jarvis explains, used for wages, utilities, emergency response, and other necessities. “You can't just pull a billion dollars out of that and expect the park to operate. So the premise is, you’re setting the parks up to fail.” 

“The narrative is going to be, ‘See, the park service can’t even maintain the bathrooms. We need to turn to private money to manage these things for profit,” says Michael Childers, a historian who studies the environmental impacts of tourism and is writing a book about Yosemite. The downsizing of regional offices, Chakrin added, could also result in the need for contractors to perform work once held in those offices, like architectural services, engineering, and construction oversight. 

Many park service leaders agree that operations like restaurants and hotels are best run by concessioners. But they also say that the goals of for-profit companies are often at odds with the park service’s mission to protect resources. Historically, concessioner contracts have created monopoly conditions that led to ill-maintained facilities, higher prices, and less income for parks, leading to attempts to reform the concessions system from 1998 and onward. 

Many park service leaders agree that operations like restaurants and hotels are best run by concessioners. But they also say that the goals of for-profit companies are often at odds with the park service’s mission to protect resources.

For example, as a relic of a law driven by the concessions lobby in 1965, concessioners are owed for improvements they make to facilities, and must be bought out of those interests, called Leaseholder Surrender Interests (LSI), at the end of a contract—either by the Park Service or a new concessioner. LSIs can become burdensome debts for parks, potentially forcing them to accept lower franchise fees to attract new contracts. This happened famously in the Grand Canyon in 2014, when longtime concessioner Xanterra’s contract expired with nearly $200 million of LSI on the books. In an attempt to attract new bidders and a better franchise rate, the Park Service had to buy down over $100 million of the LSI—borrowing from other parks to do so—and split the concession contract, awarding the smaller portion to Delaware North. Xanterra sued the park to halt the process. Today, it remains the park’s largest concessioner.

Private companies have operated in Yosemite since the area was first set aside as a preserve in 1864, and it has among the largest concessioner presences in the NPS, making it one the best places to preview the potential pitfalls of further privatization—not just for parks but for visitors, too. Aramark, which operates here under the subsidiary Yosemite Hospitality LLC, earned “marginal” and “unsatisfactory” ratings in park service operating reviews in 2023 and 2024, respectively. The most recent report cited public health concerns like rodent issues that shut down dining facilities five times last year, including twice at the bar in the historic Ahwahnee Hotel, where rooms start at $578 a night. Issues at the bar, the report stated, included “rodent contamination in the ceiling void directly above a food preparation area.”  

I swung through the Ahwahnee Bar on Saturday night, where I ordered a $16 cocktail from a comically dour bartender and had my bill in front of me before I had my drink. While waiting, I chatted with a portly, balding hotel guest who deemed the hotel “a little worn,” noting that the lobby could use some work. He had a good eye: the latest annual report also documented leaks at the Ahwahnee Hotel bar and lobby, as well as exposed rusty nails on decks at the Yosemite Valley Lodge, and mushrooms growing behind the ice machine in the employee break room at the historic Wawona Hotel. 

I wasn’t hungry. After finishing my drink, I wandered out onto the hotel lawn, where well-heeled guests splayed out casually beneath a view of Half Dome, and overheard a trio of couples from the Bay Area complaining about the service at the bar. One woman was staying at the hotel. “This place is overpriced,” she told me in a light European accent.

“The view is beautiful,” someone pointed out.

“They’re charging a lot for this view!” laughed a woman in a sleek black dress. When I told her who ran the hotel, she and her partner exchanged looks. “I’m not surprised to hear that Aramark is involved in this,” she said. She worked with them, but wouldn’t tell me how. 

Aramark responded to questions sent by RE:PUBLIC and Outside with a written statement. “While we acknowledge that past performance did not always meet expectations, we’ve taken decisive steps to improve,” the company stated. “Renovations and repairs are underway across lodging, employee housing, restaurants, and concession areas throughout the park, all aimed at enhancing the visitor experience and supporting our employees.”

Some former park service leaders believe that further privatization will happen mostly on a function-by-function basis—ranger services, campgrounds, fee collection, search and rescue, and transportation could all eventually be outsourced, they say. But others fear that the government will outsource the management of entire parks.    

“There are ideologues in this administration, that I've encountered in previous administrations, that basically look at national parks on par with Disneyland,” Jarvis says. “That it’s an amusement park, and it should be run by the private sector.”  

Proponents of this theory believe that the less-visited park units Burgum wants to offload to states could be candidates for private management. “I've heard talk of, ‘we can turn these parks over to the states,’” says Dan Wenk, a former Yellowstone superintendent who was reportedly forced out of his role in 2018 after clashing with the first Trump administration. “Do you know how many states want to turn [their own] parks over to the National Park Service because they can’t afford to operate them?”  

The administration has made no statements to this effect outright, but Jarvis is unassuaged. “Is there an executive order that says convert the national parks to Disneyland?” he asks rhetorically. “No. They're not that stupid. This is much more incremental and insidious, in my view.” 

On September 25, forty-three former park superintendents sent a letter to Doug Burgum urging him to close the national parks in the event of a government shutdown. The letter reminded Burgum of the damage done when parks stayed open during past shutdowns, during which people pooped on roadsides in Yosemite, chopped down Joshua trees, and poached a pregnant elk in Zion. “If you don’t act now, history is not just doomed to repeat itself,” they warned, “the damage could in fact be much worse.” Within the first week or so of the shutdown, campground squatting and illegal BASE jumping were reported in Yosemite.

Violations as egregious as these make headlines, as do overflowing trash cans and toilets (which, to play off Jarvis’s statements, may be better indicators of the health of an amusement park than a national one). But experts say that most of the long-term risks to our national parks under the current administration are less visible.

One of the most important divisions in the NPS is called Inventory & Monitoring. Once composed of approximately 300 staff nationwide, I&M tracks what they call “vital signs,” the key indicators of the health of a park’s ecosystem. At Yosemite, those include bird populations; the incidence of bark beetles in subalpine forests; and climate trends like temperature, snowpack, and precipitation. Data gathered by I&M across its 32 networks is “one of the first places you'll look to see if there’s trouble in a national park,” an employee in the Natural Resource Stewardship and Science Directorate (NRSS) of the park service told me.

Back in May, however, I&M personnel heard in two meetings that all or a large portion of the group could be RIFed as soon as the next several days, according to communications reviewed by RE:PUBLIC and Outside. Besides their jobs, I&M staff were acutely concerned about losing decades of data they’d gathered in the parks, an I&M employee I’ll call Joanna told me. The group spent the next week feverishly uploading data and scientific protocols to an online repository and transferring access to park staff whose jobs seemed more secure. 

“The thought was, if our program is going to be taken away, we need to make sure someone else, or even our future selves, can rebuild,” Joanna said.

A group from Inventory & Monitoring spent a week feverishly uploading data and scientific protocols to an online repository and transferring access to park staff whose jobs seemed more secure. “The thought was, if our program is going to be taken away, we need to make sure someone else, or even our future selves, can rebuild,” one employee said.

When a federal judge’s temporary restraining order blocked the RIFs on May 9, Joanna was relieved. “We dodged a bullet,” she said. But Joanna is now furloughed and, though I&M was not listed specifically in the Interior Department’s recent RIF court filing, the group has already lost approximately 80 staffers, including 12 of its 32 network program managers, according to internal communications. 

The NPS has a dual mandate deriving from the 1916 Organic Act, which defines the park service’s mission: “to preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” Parkies take that mission seriously—several repeated it to me verbatim during interviews—and some call it the “dueling” mandate, because the goals of preservation and enjoyment are often at odds.

Employees say the Trump administration is endangering preservation in the pursuit of enjoyment. “They’re only here to create playgrounds for people,” said a ranger at a California park. “They’re totally missing half of the point.” The ranger pointed to one of Trump’s Making America Beautiful Again executive orders, which instructed Burgum to increase visitor capacity at national parks and to rescind any rules that “unnecessarily restrict recreation.” At Yosemite, Rachel also told me that staff now have to make a case for expenditures in terms of cost savings and economic value, not conservation. “The scientists have to justify everything in different language now,” she said. Last week, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced bills to allow off-highway vehicles in national parks.

The hemorrhaging of leadership could make it more difficult for the agency to stand up to anti-conservation interests, too. The day before I drove to Yosemite, I met Jon Jarvis in the East Bay, at Rosie the Riveter national historical park. White-haired and mustached, Jarvis has been retired from the park service for over a decade, but even in his blue jeans and military cap, he still had the comportment and charisma of a wily political hand. He told me that, though Senate-confirmed directors like himself can also be fired, they nonetheless have a degree of political “horsepower” that acting directors don’t. As a Senate-confirmed executive, says Jarvis, “You can push back.”

He shared some war stories he won’t let me print, but here’s one he will: before the DOI made the 2012 decision to place a 20-year moratorium on new mining claims near the Grand Canyon, Jarvis met with the then-directors of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. Even though the land in question was out of his jurisdiction, he was able to persuade the BLM in particular to endorse a decision in the national park’s interest. In negotiations like this, an acting director might not have the necessary relationships or respect from other agency heads, he says. “They could get rolled really easily.” 

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Park superintendents likewise play a role in standing up to pressure from anti-conservation interests. During his tenure as Yellowstone superintendent, Dan Wenk commissioned studies on the environmental impacts of visitorship and resisted pressure from then–Secretary Zinke to reduce bison herds in the park. By contrast, Yosemite’s current acting superintendent, Ray McPadden, was praised by local Republican congressman Tom Clintock for “proactively seeking opportunities to expand visitor capacity” in Yosemite despite short-staffing this summer, including opening every campground for the first time since 2019.

In 1978, Congress passed legislation that clarified that when the two goals of the dueling mandate are in conflict, the Park Service should prioritize preservation. Wenk says this leaves the agency’s priority in no way ambiguous, to NPS managers at least. But David Vela, who also served under Trump 1.0, frames this as common sense.

“If you take away the scientists, archaeologists, facilities people,” he says, “what will there be to enjoy?”

On Sunday morning, I joined a group of twenty other hikers for a public, ranger-led nature walk in Mariposa Grove. The grove is home to approximately 500 giant sequoias, some around 3,000 years old, a petite, braided, and energetic ranger informed the crowd. (She declined to answer questions from RE:PUBLIC and Outside.) It’s also the birthplace of the national park idea, she said. As a nod to this provenance, the National Park Service’s iconic flat ranger hats are wrapped in a leather band with gold sequoia cones. 

Two keystones of park service history are rooted in Yosemite, though most people only know one: In 1903, Teddy Roosevelt famously took a three-day camping trip in Yosemite with John Muir, sleeping the first night here in the Mariposa Grove. Having already dedicated two national parks, Roosevelt was inspired by that trip to create three more, as well as the U.S. Forest Service, ultimately protecting more public lands than any president in history.

But the Mariposa Grove also contributed to the service’s lesser-known origins. Though Yellowstone was established in 1872 as the first official national park, the concept of a park protected by Congress for the use of all Americans was actually conceived eight years earlier—also in Yosemite. 

During the Civil War, Congress passed the 1864 Yosemite Act, which designated the Valley and the Mariposa Grove as the first federally authorized park. (These areas would be held in trust by the state of California until 1906, while a surrounding 1,500 square miles became a national park in 1890.) 

This was an unprecedented act. Before the war, the role of the national government in citizens’ lives was minimal; there wasn’t a federal income tax, let alone responsibility for the government to preserve public lands, says historian and former national parks superintendent Rolf Diamant. But in the midst of the war, he says, “there was realization on the part of the Lincoln administration and Congress that the United States could not ask for the continued sacrifice that was being called for on the battlefield without promising its people something better coming out of the conflict. A more perfect union.”  

Lincoln tapped Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted—who by chance happened to be living in Mariposa—to recommend how the nation’s new park should be managed. Olmsted’s resulting 1865 report on Yosemite established the tenets that would become the foundation of the Organic Act and the national parks ideal: “One was that these places should be enjoyed by everyone,” says Diamant. “But also that the government had an abiding responsibility, a political duty, to take care of these places.” The American people, says Diamant, should know that their national parks were conceived as a promise to them after a violent and bloody conflict—the promise of a better future, that their sacrifice wouldn’t be for naught.

An 1865 report on Yosemite established the tenets that would become the foundation of the national parks ideal: “One was that these places should be enjoyed by everyone,” says Diamant. “But also that the government had an abiding responsibility, a political duty, to take care of these places.”

That degree of sacrifice is difficult to square with prevailing attitudes today. In Yosemite, I interviewed visitors across the political spectrum. Most were at least obliquely aware of the news around parks, and Trump and Kamala Harris voters alike said they disapproved of defunding the service. But several visitors also expressed apathy.

“I don’t read much,” a muscular and mustached 34-year-old Air Force maintenance technician I’ll call Hal said gruffly, when I told him I was a journalist. His buddy, a 21-year-old I’ll call Brian, likewise said, “I don’t really watch the news.” Both men asked to remain anonymous as active service members.

“He’s from Minnesota,” Hal guffawed, as he crouched and pumped water through a filter at the top of Vernal Fall. “He don’t watch the news!”

I’d caught the guys on their way down from Half Dome; they’d been hiking since 4:30 a.m. While both believed people need a place to escape and enjoy nature, they weren’t interested in engaging about Trump’s management of the parks. Hal voted for him, but “I’m not a big fan of politics,” he said. “They’re all out for themselves.” Brian didn’t vote.

Dusty, a mulletted and tattooed hiker from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, told me he was “American” when I asked how he identified politically. (He’s a Republican, he later clarified.) Dusty hadn’t heard much news about the parks, but he was nonchalant. “Four years from now, the situation could change drastically. I wouldn’t quite sweat it.” 

The most surprising thing was how few voters identified as liberals, being in blue-state California. Most people I spoke to called themselves “moderate” or “independent.” But for all the independent thinking people said they were doing, no one said anything fresh or new. Particularly prosaic were the visitors who told me they loved national parks but shrugged over “politics.” Here they were, enjoying one of the great benefits of their democratic republic, yet refusing to participate. 

“The American people need to think about what they really want in a system of protected places,” says James, the former NPS official who served during Trump 1.0. James, too, fears further privatization, but he doesn’t believe the Trump administration has a long-term design for the park system—he doesn’t think they have a design at all. “These are dismantlers,” he says. “They wrecked everything, and they don’t have a plan.”

After 36 hours in the thrumming crowds, I was glad to leave the Mariposa Grove and head east on Tioga Road, toward the wild and quieter portion of the park that Yosemite employees say they love most. The air was cooler up here, the signage sparing, the views of granite domes and uninterrupted forest vast and heartrending. Two and a half hours later, just before the Tioga Pass entrance station on the park’s eastern boundary, I pulled into a trailhead.

A short, leg-burning hike brought me to Gaylor Ridge, where stands of threatened whitebark pine filled the air with the sweet smell of woods. Fall had come to the alpine. The ground cover glowed gold and red. The few hikers I saw said hello.

Research says that people tend to value nature primarily for its utility to themselves. When I searched beneath that familiar animal relief I felt out here, I knew I was no different. It was a survival instinct borne from knowing that in this increasingly concrete world there was still somewhere for me—for us—to go. That we still had habitat and space to roam. 

When recalled from the vantage point of mid-October, this place seems particularly fragile, even vulnerable. The entrance station within sight of the trailhead is now unmanned; friends camping off Tioga Road tell me that, emboldened by the lack of rangers, visitors are bringing dogs onto trails.  

Yosemite Valley, with its narrow slice of swimming pools and tent villages and end-of-season Patagonia sales, belies the fact that nearly 95 percent of the park is Congressionally designated wilderness where, according to law, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” Road construction is prohibited in wilderness areas, but as I stood on the shore of Upper Gaylor Lake, the Trump administration was trying to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule that prevents it. If they succeed, this will open up around 50 million acres of national forestland to logging, including in the Inyo National Forest just 1,500 feet from where I stood.

National parks are the darling of public lands, receiving the highest degree of protections and the most public support. A natural question: If the administration is kneecapping the park service, what’s happening to more vulnerable agencies? Childers, the historian, called national parks the “canary in the coal mine” for threats to public lands. 

Many of these threats don’t make headlines, but when they do, citizens have made their stance clear. In June, bipartisan outcry shut down Utah Republican senator Mike Lee’s efforts to sell off up to 1.2 million acres of BLM land for housing development. During the truncated 21-day comment period on ending the Roadless Rule, 183,000 comments poured into the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 99 percent of them against the rollback, according to an analysis by the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation and advocacy group. “Public pressure to shape the parks has always been a driving force,” Childers says. He believes we’ll continue to see “dramatic” efforts to extract wealth from public lands. “And if history is any lesson,” he says, “the pushback from the larger public will also be as dramatic.”  

Suddenly, on the opposite shore of the lake, movement. A coyote, its sandy coat blending with the grass, trotted below a scree field. I detected two more creatures approaching from my other side: a woman and a little boy walking up the trail. The boy bounded up excitedly when I pointed out the coyote. The animal froze, then looked at us with curiosity. We stared back, spellbound. 

“He’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him, eye to eye,” the boy said with awe. He wondered aloud if the coyote would eat him, but his mom assured him that the coyote only eats small animals, like rodents.

“But he sees me as his enemy,” the boy said.

Mom smiled. “No, he sees you more like a deer. Like another animal.”

In May, in Washington, Democratic senator Jeff Merkley challenged Burgum’s remarks about unleashing the natural resources on America’s “balance sheet.” He asked the secretary, “How do you value recharging one soul on the rim of the Grand Canyon?” Or on the shore of Upper Gaylor Lake? I’d seen just a handful of visitors and not a single concession booth. Was this part of the park still worth preserving? What if it were 1,500 feet away?

“National parks are not a place for bottom-line decision-making,” Chakrin had said to me. “There isn’t a real good economic model for protecting something forever.”  

The coyote lost its interest in us and stalked on. Suddenly, the boy shouted, “It caught something!” By now the rest of their group—three more adults—had caught up. At first the coyote lay on the ground, tearing at its kill, but then it quickly tired of our voyeurism. It stood, two dark hind legs dangling from its mouth, and trotted up the hill, occasionally glancing back at us before disappearing into a band of brush.

The hikers and I stood and gazed upon the scree field for a moment, listening to the squirrels chirping. We shared a warm silence. Then one of them, the boy’s trim and bespectacled father, spoke. “Well,” he said, “enjoy your trip.” Likewise, I said, and began my walk down the hill. They continued toward the lake. The coyote was long gone. We all went our separate ways, with space, for now, to roam.

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