While many observers predicted chaos, visitors who headed to NPS-managed sites over the summer mostly saw parks that seemed to be functioning as normal. The bathrooms were clean, the trash picked up, the visitor centers staffed.

Behind that veneer of normalcy, though, all was not well. Outside Articles Editor Fred Dreier spent two months talking to active and former rangers at Rocky Mountain National Park and learned how staff cuts—and now a government shutdown—have stretched some of them to their breaking point.

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And what people told me is, “Look, the people who work at the NPS care a lot about their jobs. And they’re going to do everything within their power to make sure it seems like things are not falling apart. They are going to do so at the sacrifice of their own mental and physical well-being. They’re going to take on extra shifts and work long hours and do these things to make sure that the park appears like it’s working normal, even though they’re going to have to really step up to do it.”

And so that’s the thrust of the story, is about how the people at Rocky Mountain National Park, the rangers, the full-time rangers—they lost anywhere from 30 to 40 of their co-workers—but they are stepping up to fill those jobs and to fill those positions. And by doing so, they are having to take on lots of overtime, lots of extra shifts, and work these insanely long weeks and long hours to make sure everything is working well. But they are doing so at the sacrifice of their own mental and emotional well-being.

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things have always been tough and it’s always been a labor of love, but this is the year that it reached a ridiculous level of physical and emotional strife. My sources told me they saw people breaking down in tears on their job, searching for other jobs, just having really, really difficult situations.

And park management knows this. One of the most pressing parts of my story was that I obtained an email that was sent from an NPS full-time employee at Rocky Mountain National Park to management as a ‘reply all’ to a message that had been sent by the park superintendent. And in this email, the NPS worker said, “This is beyond what I’ve ever seen. I’ve worked for the NPS for 12 years. I’ve worked for the Forest Service. I’ve worked for the BLM. And I’ve never seen a park unit so understaffed, so overworked, and seen people pushed so to their breaking point. And we need relief. We need some type of light at the end of the tunnel that’s coming.” And from what I understand, that was not addressed by park management.

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