Nat parks and shutdowns

When Channel Islands Nat Park closes I sail to a very unknown dive spot between Gull and Santa Cruz islands. I can get unlimited 8" scallops, I kid you not. BBQ them on the boat... heaven!!! Those pesky park rangers always trying to interrupt my grub.

Chanel islands is did bc there is a town on Catalina island. Obv they can't close everything. Somewhere like Gettysburg battlefield (where a lot of ppl train) or Shenandoah is a different story.

Rich?

The president has pretty wide discretion on what parts of the government will shut down and what will be kept running. During the Boehner shutdown, Obama immediately closed the national parks not because there was no money to keep them open but because he could and it would make everyone mad at Republicans.

If Trump is smart (he is not), he will keep the national parks open. October is a relatively light month for tourism at national parks and it is not very expensive to keep them open. Instead, Trump will probably fire park rangers en masse along with hordes of other career government employees so that there is total chaos when the government reopens.

And if the Dems were smart (they are not), they would have been out in public raising hell about the health care cuts at every chance they had to build public support. They haven't and will face a backlash for the government shutdown. Trump and the Republicans may get through this unscathed.

Good to know how it works. October is anything but a light month at the east coast mountain parks - Shenandoah, Great Smokies, and New River Gorge. I'm not sure if its busier than summer, but they absolutely need the leaf peeper revenue. From going to Shenandoah many times, I'd say October is as busy as the summer.

Then there are places like Yorktown, which are busy in October, because that is when the battle was.

Tourists aside, for those letsrunners who train in the national parks, it will be a huge inconvenience.

Of course, if the president designates national park workers as essential or orders them open, this would negate all of this. I'm not betting on it though. Looks like Trump did keep the open last time:

npr.org

Here's what a government shutdown could affect around the country

A federal shutdown will impact people across the United States. NPR's network of member stations explains how these effects will be felt nationwide.

Link:www.npr.org/2025/09/30/g-s1-90732/gove...

Albeit with less staffing, services, and with parts closed due to minimal staffing. The courts ruled it was illegal to use entry fees to run the parks, though Trump has a habit of ignoring the law.

The main idea of most of these "national parks" was to set aside and preserve wilderness areas, not to build a tourist resort.

Shutting them off to tourists for a while will do no harm to them at all. If anything, they will regenerate some of their wild nature, with no gawping humans spoiling the vibe. This should be done on a regular basis.

So the complaint is you can't go there, well big deal. The bears and mooses don't want you, they need some time off. It's not some kind of zoo, it's a human-free zone

What about the towns built around these national parks that depend on money from this tourism? What about the people who live places like Gettsyburg , Bar Harbor, who depend on these places for their training.

I sort of agree in principle, but we've bull dozed nature to the point that except where the federal government (and to a lesser extent the states) are preserving it, its almost inaccessible. I bet over half of the runners on this site depend on federal or state lands for their runs.

Unfortunately, if we only opened the parks around a set schedule, we would overwhelm the resources to manage the crowds. We'd have to go to permitting. In the case of the national park system, we'd lose a lot of money that goes to the federal government.

If we'd managed the parks in this fashion from the beginning, we'd get used to it, but what you are proposing would destroy the economies of the towns built up along the park system - even cities like Roanoke and Asheville would be devastated. In short, our parks are too big a system to be closed for more than the occasional shutdown.

Finally, we also have wilderness areas, where nature is closer to its "natural" state.