Hidden gems, scenic stays and parks worth the trip
With more people hitting the road this summer, national parks are expected to see record crowds. But if you’re looking to escape the congestion, our Ali Reid has uncovered some hidden gems worth exploring.
Americans kicking off summer at national parks and U.S. Forest Service trailheads this Memorial Day weekend will find clean restrooms, well-staffed visitor centers and tidy trails.
But longtime public lands advocates say it’s only a matter of time before campers, hikers and anglers start seeing cracks in what they believe is a wafer-thin facade, as rangers scramble to keep up following widespread layoffs, retirements and buyouts. Public lands advocates worry the Trump administration will use the subsequent problems as justification for closing, selling or transferring parks and land to private operators.
When Trump took office, park service staffing was already 20% lower than it was in 2010, even though 2024 was the busiest year for park visitation in history, with 332 million visitors last year.
“It’s almost like death by 1,000 cuts is where this is going to lead,” said Josh Hicks, The Wilderness Society’s conservation campaigns director. “They may be trying to put on the facade that everything is going swimmingly but it’s really not, and there will be a slow degradation of our public lands.”
Park workers compared to ‘a rubber band that’s pretty stretched thin’
The National Park Service manages more than 84 million acres of land, from the tiny Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, Missouri, to the sprawling 13.2 million-acre Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve in Alaska. The Forest Service manages another 193 million acres ‒ bigger than the whole of Texas.
Since taking office, Trump and his administration have fired thousands of park service and Forest Service employees, implemented a hiring freeze and delayed the planned hiring of seasonal workers critical to staffing visitor centers, maintaining trails and cleaning toilets. But at the same time, Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum has ordered park managers to keep open campgrounds, visitor centers and toilets.
The National Park Service did not respond to a request from USA TODAY to explain summer staffing and maintenance plans. The Interior Department declined to comment on staffing reductions.
At Yellowstone National Park, where the wildlife season is well underway, guide service owner Cara McGary said toilets remain clean and well-stocked. McGary, a former park ranger whose partner is a ranger in Alaska, runs In Our Nature Guiding Services. In her 800-person hometown of Gardiner, Montana, almost everyone has a connection to Yellowstone, she said, from park rangers and maintenance workers to schoolteachers who’ve seen their students vanish after Trump fired their parents.
McGary said bookings for her guide services have been up ‒ she suspects some customers are trying to visit before any real Trump-related cuts take effect. Other public lands advocates say bookings have been slower than usual, in part because of Trump’s trade war with Canada.
“I think it’s going to be OK if we can make it through the sprint of spring, but what happens in September?” McGary asked. “We have a legacy of people in the federal government giving more than 100%. They are already a rubber band that’s pretty stretched thin. And we’re about to push them further.”
McGary said she’s facing decisions about how to handle bathroom breaks if Yellowstone can’t keep its toilets clean as she tours clients through the park, seeking wolves, bears and other wildlife. During the 2018-2019 federal government shutdown, McGary and other park supporters held “guerilla” toilet cleanings so things stayed tolerable, but she worries the situation will be worse this summer.
“I don’t know how screwed we are. But I think there’s going to be consequences,” she said. “It sucks. There is no win in this.”
Don’t forget to bring your own water
Just a few miles from one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country, the Maroon Bells Scenic Area sits nestled amidst towering mountains, with aspen trees coating the hillsides and quiet lakes reflecting the sun overhead.
But while the five-star hotels of Aspen, including the Little Nell and the Hotel Jerome, offer almost every conceivable amenity, Maroon Bells visitors this year will have to bring their own water from town 26 miles away.
Normally, U.S. Forest Service employees make sure that the more than 300,000 annual visitors have access to both toilets and drinking water when they arrive at the Maroon Bells trailhead.
“Man, the richest country in the world ought to be fund at a basic level the public lands everyone has access to,” said Scott Fitzwilliams, who oversaw the area as supervisor of the White River National Forest. Fitzwilliams quit his job in February as the Trump administration began layoffs and job cuts across the Forest Service.
The White River forest is the nation’s busiest, home to ski areas including Aspen, Vail and Beaver Creek, along with hundreds of miles of hiking and mountain bike trails, dozens of campgrounds and innumerable sparkling lakes for fishing.
Fitzwilliams said he expects that many pit toilets in the forest will only be pumped out once this summer down from as much as four times. He said his successors had also planned to bring in student-workers this summer to help with maintenance and trail-clearing, but approval from Elon Musk’s DOGE teams came too late to make it work this year.
“It’s going to be mid-to late-summer before people begin to see it, but it’s going to be pretty profound,” he predicted. “We may get one (toilet) pump for the year. It’s going to get ugly.”
Like other public lands experts, Fitzwilliams said he’s also worried what will happen during wildfire season. Typically, National Incident Management Teams are made up of public lands workers across the country ‒ people who have other day jobs but get seconded to the fire-management teams during big fires. Trump’s reductions have created a dramatic dropoff in the number of both firefighters and firefighting supervisors in both national parks and national forests, he said.
“The mid- to long-term impacts from this is not going to be good, and the public is really going to see it and suffer the consequences,” he said.
Risk to visitors, public lands and economic vitality
National parks in particular, and public lands in general, are among the most popular functions of the federal government, polls show. The Trust for Public Land in a recent survey conducted by YouGov found that 74% of Americans oppose closing public lands, 63% oppose layoffs, and 62% oppose funding reductions. TPL noted that with such overwhelming reputations, federal leaders should reconsider budget cuts.
“Simply put, there are fewer rangers, wildlife and conservation experts, and stewards on the ground ‒ just when they’re needed most,” Trust for Public Land CEO Carrie Besnette Hauser told USA TODAY. “This isn’t just a risk to visitor experience, it’s a risk to the health of our lands and the economic vitality of rural and gateway communities, from Maine down to Florida, to Texas and Hawaii. Our public lands are more than beautiful places. They are economic engines, job creators, and essential spaces for healing, connection, and shared history.”
Given the reality on the ground, however, Cassidy Jones, a former park service ranger who now works for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, said her friends and former colleagues are all preparing to do their best to serve the public as the summer season ramps up.
Like McGary, Jones asked park and forest visitors to be as understanding and prepared as possible this summer, and to be prepared to see things like park superintendents working in visitor centers. Other parks have reported making plans to have wildlife biologists clean restrooms or are cycling office staff into campground management.
“While most parks may feel very typical on the surface, there’s a lot going on in the background,” Jones said. “The unfortunate end of that for visitors is that they will be fed this vision of parks where it’s business as usual, but it’s going to be very far from that behind the scenes.”