Trail projects around the state have kept Wyoming Pathways busy in recent years. Fueled both by the growing popularity of outdoor recreation and by statewide interest in nurturing the industry, the nonprofit group has worked with local and federal partners to develop trails from Togwotee Pass near Dubois to Pole Mountain near Laramie and Commissary Ridge near Kemmerer.

Wyoming Pathways Executive Director Mike Kusiek expects that pace to slow if not halt due to the Trump administration’s recent cuts that resulted in untold job losses in federal offices managing Wyoming’s national forests, parks and other public lands. Federal spending freezes will also surely damper the work, he said.

“Ninety percent of our budget is federal funds to get work done” on national forest and Bureau of Land Management land, Kusiek said. “Funding streams are frozen.”

Even more discouraging, he said, is this: If those funds become unfrozen, “do we still have enough people working on the landscape to help deploy them?”

Questions like Kusiek’s are hovering over Wyoming’s outdoor recreation industry, which has been bulking up in recent years as increasing crowds flock to the state’s national parks, mountain biking networks, snowmobile trail destinations, ski hills and fishing waters.

The state government created a trust fund specifically to pay for outdoor recreation infrastructure. Yellowstone National Park tallied its second-highest annual visitation in 2024 at 4.7 million. So many people camped on national forests that districts revised rules and leaned on volunteer labor. Trail crews built miles of pathway to make room for more users, climbing rangers patrolled popular crags and national park superintendents experimented with shuttles to alleviate crowding.

Now, however, a community that many argue is already understaffed to meet increasing demand has taken a large hit. And advocates are worried.

“Public land management is the cornerstone of Wyoming’s outdoor recreation sector,” said Addi Jenkins, executive director of Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Business Alliance. In a state where nearly 50% of the land is public, she said, these layoffs threaten critical services to communities and businesses. “Without a well-staffed workforce, we risk losing the very resources that allow Wyoming’s outdoor economy to flourish and our way of life to persist.”

Of the 15,798 jobs that are identified in the Wyoming outdoor recreation sector, an estimated 884 are government related, said Dan McCoy, director of the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation, Tourism and Hospitality Initiative.

“Outdoor recreation is a big part of our economy in Wyoming,” he said, noting that the industry generated $2.2 billion last year.

The success of the industry rests in large part on capable management of public lands, the Wyoming Outdoor Council noted in a call to action this week.

“The agencies that manage the public lands … will now face significant constraints — not only in their ability to fight fires, maintain campgrounds and trails, and respond to emergencies but also in overseeing activities that allow for responsible multiple use of our public lands and support local economies,” the group’s email read.

After all, Jenkins said, a slowdown in crowds is unlikely.

“There is still going to be a good amount of tourism, but the experience might be degraded and those experiences may fall short of the satisfaction that we normally receive,” she said, which could do lasting harm to Wyoming’s reputation.

In a recent Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources Commission meeting, agency Director David Glenn told the board that he has been unable to glean hard data from Wyoming’s federal agencies.

“We really don’t know how it’s going to affect outdoor recreation and other services in Wyoming, but we know it’s going to affect them to some degree,” Glenn said. In response, his agency is putting together a team to offer any needed support. “We’re thinking strategically, we’re thinking toward the future.”

“It may be that State Parks ends up helping out, keeping certain things open across the state while this stuff gets figured out with the federal government,” Glenn said.

Crown jewels

On Feb. 14, the federal government reportedly cut 1,000 positions from the National Park Service. It has been difficult to identify exactly how this impacted Wyoming’s parks. Public information officers from Yellowstone and Grand Teton routed inquiries to the D.C. office, which provided generic statements confirming only that the service will hire seasonal workers this summer.

However, Bill Ward with the Association of National Park Rangers said their best information indicates that Grand Teton lost five employees, while Yellowstone lost seven. As a comparison, Shenandoah lost 15 employees and Rocky Mountain lost 12.

It’s a tumultuous time for NPS employees, Ward said.

“I can tell you that right now there is a huge amount of uncertainty and confusion throughout the Park Service,” said Ward, a retired ranger himself. “The term I keep hearing is ‘devastated.’”

It’s positive news that the service is bringing on seasonal workers, he said, but onboarding them is a big task that will likely be slowed by the chaos.

“So while it will help in the long run, there may still be some shortages and some impacts in the early part” of the coming season, he said. The whiplash of news, hearsay and rumor, from lawsuits to new email demands and threats of further layoffs, is nearly impossible to keep up with.

To add insult to injury, he said, the Trump administration placed a $1 spending limit on government credit cards. “Parks usually use those cards to pay utility bills and buy toilet paper, travel and those types of things.”

NPS cuts sparked outcry from conservation groups and others worried about stewardship and safety at the popular destinations.

Managing crowds

In Yellowstone National Park, which has seen annual visitation grow from 3.2 million in 2013 to 4.7 million in 2024, Superintendent Cam Sholly has long advocated for increased staff. Worker levels need to grow to handle the crowds, he told WyoFile in September.

“You need people to manage people, and you need people to protect this park,” Sholly said.

Within the ranks of employees, confusion and worry dominate. One employee of Grand Teton National Park, who asked to speak anonymously for fear of reprisal, told WyoFile that park workers are “concerned for our parks, our communities and our colleagues.” The employee has seen preliminary indications that their job will be secure this summer, though it’s more than a month past the time of year when their position is typically confirmed.

National Park Service system staffing has eroded by 20% since 2010 while parks have experienced a 16% increase in visitation, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.

“We were already operating at somewhat of a constrained budget, constrained capacity for staffers,” said NPCA Northern Rockies Connectivity Program Manager Allison Michalski. “So this is really compounding, and I would say amplifying, some of those challenges.”

Cuts could have ripple effects on the robust visitor economy in park gateway communities like Jackson Hole, she said. They could also hamper emergency response efforts, including wildfire prevention and response. However, she said, so much is still uncertain.

“It’s another big ‘we don’t know yet,’ due to the lack of transparency and due to the challenges of getting good information,” she said. For the upcoming season in Wyoming, she said, it could look like any of the following: “Shorter visitor center hours, delayed openings, closed campgrounds, maintenance backlogs, trash and sanitation issues, restroom issues … and potentially public safety concerns.”

Reflecting that uncertainty, the NPS press team comments offer little specifics.

“The NPS is assessing our most critical staffing needs for park operations for the coming season and is working to hire key positions,” a February statement read. “The NPS is committed to protecting public lands, infrastructure, and communities while ensuring public access.”

Local economies 

The federal government owns 97% of the land in Teton County, including Yellowstone and Grand Teton, “so we just have a lot of federal staffers here who are really ingrained in our community and do the very difficult and specialized job of protecting resources,” Michalski said.

A crowd gathered at the Jackson Town Square last weekend to protest cuts to the federal workforce. Participants held signs in support of the federal workforce and hung an upside-down American flag, a symbol of distress, near the town’s iconic antler arch.

The local impacts to northwestern Wyoming also prompted the Teton County Board of Commissioners to pen a letter to Wyoming’s congressional delegation expressing “deep concern and frustration” over the layoffs.

“Public lands in Teton County are the basis of our economic prosperity,” the Feb. 21 letter stated. “They must be properly managed and staffed … Staff that have been recently fired protect public safety, improving the experience of millions of annual visitors.”

Understaffing the public land management agencies, it continued, “will harm local businesses and the employees who drive our economy and sustain our community.” Commissioners asked the congresspeople to share any information.

The county board has not received a response, two commissioners confirmed this week.

Yellowstone and Grand Teton are huge attractions, but they are only a small part of the state’s public lands, which also include BLM badlands and deserts, mountainous national forests and state parks.

‘Who’s going to do the work?’

In Lander, job cuts gutted the Shoshone National Forest’s Washakie District office, which lost eight positions by late February, said retired Forest Service employee Bill Lee. A sign posted on the office door notified the public that the building didn’t have enough staff to remain open.

Fired employees included an archaeologist, NEPA coordinator and hydrology tech, Lee said, all “exceptional” workers. (A civil service board ruled Wednesday that thousands of fired USDA workers must get their jobs back at least temporarily, Politico reported, which could mean they get reinstated.)

“I think my big concern is it’s arbitrary, and now who’s going to do the work?” Lee said. The recent cuts aren’t the first bit of downsizing. Several positions, including his former position as a recreation specialist, were eliminated last fall in response to budget constraints.

“The stuff on the ground that affects the general public on a day-to-day basis, that’s been wiped out,” he said. The result will be a skeleton crew to man a 700,000-acre landscape, he said. “Repairing things, cleaning things, painting things, reconstructing things — that will not get done. So then it becomes, how can we take care of our bathrooms, campgrounds and our trails?”

The cuts have not been felt as acutely in Wyoming BLM offices.

Like Teton County, Wyoming Pathways wrote a letter to Wyoming’s congressional delegation asking for assistance. Kusiek hopes it spurs some relief.

In the meantime, many things in his world are stalled. For example, Kusiek said, Wyoming Pathways is involved in a project to repair 13-year-old flood damage near Saratoga. The project received federal Great American Outdoors Act funding to pay for it, but that’s now in question, he said. Trump signed the law during his first presidential term.

“We’ve already put in probably 200 hours of work,” Kusiek said. “We contracted with a bridge maker, because we have to replace three bridges.”

The bridge maker is understanding about delays, Kusiek said, “but those bridges are sitting in Texas waiting to be shipped to us.”