Washington Post - At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.
The wait to enter Arizona’s Grand Canyon National Park this past weekend was twice as long as usual after the administration let go four employees who worked at the south entrance, where roughly 90 percent of the park’s nearly 5 million annual visitors pass through.
And at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, last week’s widespread layoffs gutted the team that managed reservations for renting historic farmhouses. Visitors received notifications that their reservations had been canceled indefinitely.
President Donald Trump’s purge of federal employees is not only upending the lives of National Park Service workers, but also threatening to harm the visitor experience at national parks across the country. The problems are expected to escalate during the summer season, when more than 100 million Americans and international tourists typically visit the 63 national parks in the United States.
“It’s chaos everywhere,” said Kristin Jenn, a former seasonal park ranger at Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve. “I don’t know what the next couple of months are going to bring.
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