They used to run Utah’s national parks. Trump’s mass firings are ‘a really big deal,’ they say.

Utah’s national parks are in trouble, say the people who used to run them.

Visitors will see their experiences diminished by the Trump administration’s firings of park staff and the uncertainty around seasonal hires, said three former superintendents of Utah national parks. There will also be a more profound impact on the lands and history the parks preserve, they warn.

“National parks protect our natural and our cultural heritage. It’s hard to understand what’s going to happen across the landscape when it comes to the wildlife and their migrations, or cultural resources, like archeological sites or that could be looted,” said Linda Mazzu, who served as the superintendent of Bryce Canyon National Park from 2017 to 2021. “There’s so many resources out there that could be impacted.”

Visitors to Utah’s national parks in 2023 — nearly 16 million of them — contributed $3 billion to the state economy, supporting 26,500 jobs, according to the National Park Service.

But in its push to increase government efficiency and curb federal spending, President Donald Trump’s administration has fired 1,000 park service employees, including at least 17 in Utah. Hundreds more have taken Trump’s offer to resign but get paid through September.

“The Mighty 5" — Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef and Zion — “are a package deal for a lot of people, and they’re beloved parks, and we all want to do our best for the visitor,” Mazzu said. “But we are not going to have the people that we usually have.”

‘We’re months behind’

Crowds aren’t uncommon at Utah’s popular national parks. Zion sees the third most visits annually of all 63 national parks, and discussions about managing crowds were underway long before the recent federal cuts.

But “people should expect long lines, and restrooms aren’t going to be clean” due to the Trump firings, said Sue Fritzke, who was the superintendent of Capitol Reef National Park from 2018 to 2023.

Conflicting orders coming out of Washington, D.C. about parks hiring seasonal workers, Fritzke said, have only added to the chaos.

Seasonal workers bolster the parks’ permanent workforce during busy seasons like spring and summer. This year, the park service rescinded 5,000 job offers for such workers. Then, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced it would allow those 5,000 seasonal positions to be filled — but fired 1,000 full-time park service employees.

In its latest memo, the park service said it would hire up to 7,700 seasonal employees in 2025 — more than the 5,000 promised earlier this year and up from the three-year average of 6,350, the Associated Press reported.

The park service “is hiring seasonal workers to continue enhancing the visitor experience as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management,” the agency said in a statement Monday. “We are focused on ensuring that every visitor has the chance to explore and connect with the incredible, iconic spaces of our national parks.”

The mixed messaging over seasonal workers has also created delays in training.

“Those people should have been onboarded [in February],” Fritzke said, “so that they could get trained up and get ready for the onslaught of people that are going to show up for spring break, which is not very far in the future.”

Mazzu agreed: “We’re months behind.”

In Utah, the busy season is already underway.

Traffic to Utah’s national parks ramps up in March. In 2023, the number of visitors to Arches tripled from February to March. At Zion, visitation jumped from 133,000 visitors in February to more than 336,000 in March.

“You don’t just throw somebody out there and say, ‘here, figure out how to collect fees,’ or, ‘here, figure out how this cash register works,’” Mazzu said. She added that maintenance for buildings and campgrounds “never ends. Who’s going to take care of the campgrounds if we continue to lose more positions?”

Visitors ‘can get into serious, serious’ situations

Visitors swarm Utah’s national parks for otherworldly orange cliffs, towering rock formations and desert vistas. But they are also often unfamiliar with those landscapes and the risks of heat exhaustion or flash flooding.

“People are coming from places into a location that is totally different than they understand,” said Walt Dabney, superintendent of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks from 1991 to 1999.

“If they don’t understand the heat and water and things like that,” he said, “it takes them no time to get into serious, serious difficulties. And if the staff is not there to find them quickly, this can be and has been very tragic.”

When emergencies like wildfires or search and rescue operations strike in a park, Dabney said, the entire staff responds. Mazzu described those operations in Bryce Canyon as “all-hands-on-deck” situations.

“You get people from every division,” she said. “You get interpreters, certainly the law enforcement rangers, you get maintenance, you get the people doing natural resources. They don’t have a big staff.”

“So losing two people” — the number of staff that are known to have been fired from Bryce Canyon so far — “is a really big deal,” Mazzu added.

She recalled searching for a lost hiker in the park in 2020. Park service employees, volunteers, Garfield County workers and local fire departments collaborated for three days before finally finding the visitor.

“When you have one or two fewer hands,” Mazzu said, “that’s one or two fewer people or eyes out there who might not find that person.”

More of the burden in such scenarios will now likely fall on county sheriffs and search and rescue volunteers, Dabney said. He noted that deputies often don’t have the climbing or emergency medical training of a park ranger.

And Utah’s national parks, Fritze pointed out, are sprawling.

A limited number of law enforcement rangers are tasked with covering Capitol Reef’s 250,000 acres in southern Utah, she said. If one loses their job, “all of a sudden, visitor safety is really impacted, because the visitors will keep on coming,” Fritzke continued. “It’s really more of an issue of capabilities and the capacities of the staff to be able to handle that.”

The bigger picture

Breakdowns in parking, safety and restroom cleanliness will be felt first by visitors. But the former national park managers said the staffing issues will affect far more than day-to-day operations.

Capitol Reef is home to “thousands of years of human habitation,” Frtizke said, and she worries cultural sites will see an uptick in graffiti or degradation due to the park’s reduced workforce.

“Having a larger number of staff,” she said, “is just more eyes and ears that can help protect those things and then mitigate any damage that people have done, which takes a huge amount of work.”

Dabney and Fritzke also noted national parks’ influence on the communities around them in the form of hotel stays, gear rentals, guide services and restaurant visits.

“The value of parks in rural America, in red and blue states, is absolutely massive,” Dabney said. “Millions and millions and millions of dollars come into local economies because of people coming…in from all over the world to see these places we’re lucky to have.”

And, he continued, if tourists change their plans because the visitor experience deteriorates, “there’s going to be a bunch of local businesses that are really going to be hammered.”

The fired workers, too, have “a direct impact on the economy,” Fritzke said. “Instead of being gainfully employed and participating in the community, they’re going to be on unemployment.”

For Mazzu, she worries about the loss of something less tangible, but no less important.

“It’s that sense of wonder,” Mazzu said. “So many people forget how important a sense of wonder is.”

And that experience, Mazzu said, is heavily shaped by park employees.

“They’re such a symbolic way that America has learned about the environment,” she said, “and to have them gone is a very sad thing.”

Julie Jag contributed reporting.