The Nisqually Entrance was closed the last few days due to winter storms causing tree fall and downed power lines on the road on route to the park. This photo was taken Wednesday.
Three weeks after the end of the federal government shutdown, rangers have returned to Mount Rainier, tourists are passing through the nearby communities and the bears are presumably still deep in hibernation.
But it’s not back to business as usual for the national park — and the setbacks from the shutdown may plague park staff, visitors and conservation groups for the remainder of the year.
“It’s kind of doing a cold start,” Rainier superintendent Chip Jenkins said in an interview earlier this month, soon after the park had reopened. “It’s like when you’ve left your car out for a long time in cold weather and you’re turning your engine over. We’re scraping the windows off and getting the car warmed up.”
Getting roads plowed and restoring access to Paradise garnered plenty of attention, as eager skiers and sledders awaited the reopening of their winter playground. But long after snow-lovers’ return to the slopes, the park is still playing catch-up.
The 35-day shutdown, which mostly took place in January, covered much of the park’s annual hiring period, where it finds campground overseers, trail work crews and equipment operators in advance of the summer season. It’s also when the park usually finalizes contracts for outside groups that do work in the park. A workshop designed to address the park’s ongoing traffic and parking concerns was also canceled.
“It’s the downstream effects of delays in hiring, not getting contract specifications together, not being able to hold workshops or do planning work to address deferred maintenance or our planning problems,” Jenkins said. “That’s going to change how we have to approach things later on in the year. We can’t make all that time up.”
Speaking in early February, Jenkins said it could take a month to determine just how the park will have to adjust, whether that includes abandoning projects, rescheduling work and planning, as well as catching up with conservation and recreation partners that rely on contracts with the park.
One of those partners is the Northwest Youth Corps, which sends crews of workers into the park — and throughout the region — to do maintenance on trails and other conservation work. It’s been a successful partnership, one touted by the park as helping to promote diversity in the outdoors and accomplish important trail work.
This year, though, the Corps is in limbo. It needs to submit its contracts to the park by March 1, but it still has no idea what the park’s budget will be, and how much it will have available to put toward its conservation partnerships.
“We’re a couple weeks away from having to sign task agreements that need to include a budget number,” said Jay Satz, the group’s senior director of partnerships and innovation. “Nobody knows what that is, even today. The process is going to be maddening, and it’s going to be very tight. … We’re doing a lot of work to prepare, without knowing what money might be there. This year it’s sort of like just doing it blind.”
In addition to the looming uncertainty, Satz noted that his group and many other conservation organizations faced immediate consequences during the shutdown, with volunteer workers unable to complete service requirements, facing housing uncertainties and missing payments.
The scare going forward is even greater, with the Corps needing to make decisions for the summer without having important information at hand.
“If you’ve done all that work and it works out, you feel great,” he said. “You actually survived the bureaucracy. If you do all that work and don’t get (the expected funding), what a waste of time. You’ve already started recruiting and made commitments to crew leaders and hired administrative staff. It’s like a crapshoot. We’re cautiously optimistic that we’ll the right number, but if we don’t it could be catastrophic to us budgetarily.”
Another group that’s still dealing with the shutdown’s effects is The Mountaineers, a Seattle-based recreation and conservation club that boasts 13,000 members. Each weekend of the shutdown, the club had two or three events scheduled on Mount Rainier, including safety and activity courses.
Each of those outings was canceled or relocated, according to Katherine Hollis, the group’s conservation and advocacy director. The club is volunteer-run, with activities planned a year in advance as a part of seasonal courses, so the scheduling hiccups have had “ripple effects.”
“Rainier is the winter destination for doing outdoor stuff,” Hollis said. “We had trips and courses (scheduled) on Rainier every week of the government shutdown. … It’s a struggle to figure out where can we go, where do we have permits?”
Many of the club’s courses were moved to Mount Baker, but Hollis also expressed concern about overcrowding that secondary destination. Meanwhile, the organization is facing plenty of unfinished permitting paperwork for the trips it’s planned this summer.
“For all our trips that we pull outfitter guide permitting, those (park) staff were furloughed,” she said. “Those staff are digging out of a month-plus backlog of work. We’re still figuring out how we can operate this spring and summer.”
That concern is shared by many of the recreation companies that provide guide service, she added, both those nearby Rainier and those that bring groups from Seattle and further afield.
Alongside the organizations that operate with the park directly, plenty of nearby businesses have felt lingering effects from the shutdown, as the stifled flow of visitors cut into the local tourism economy. Jenkins said the park knows its neighbors are hurting as well.
“We are all painfully aware that local businesses — their overall revenue was significantly reduced, and they don’t get to make that up,” he said.
