SHUTDOWN: WONDERLAND WITHOUT VISITORS?

What does Wonderland do without any visitors? Especially a Wonderland with over 2.2 million acres of wilderness punctuated with facilities to house, feed and generally inform millions of visitors every year? Last night at midnight, the United States Congress decided to shut the government down. The Park Service is a government service and Yellowstone National Park is officially shut down until further notice.

Essential personnel – law enforcement Rangers and all NPS employees necessary to keeping the Park protected will remain working. There are still guests in the Park and for at least the next few hours there will be Rangers available to help those visitors leave the Park. Mammoth Hot Springs, after an incredibly busy summer, will feel somewhat like a ghost town.

Yesterday, the Controller of Yellowstone’s Xanterra facilities asked my coworker to gather the General Accounting Office and Computer Center staffs in the expansive lobby of our building in Mammoth. “I know you all have questions about how the government shutdown is going to affect us.” Dead right. We were all wondering.  If the Park is shut down, absolutely no facility of the Park is available to anyone, including concessionaires’ staffs. The staff will be able to remain in any still-open building run by Xanterra, including dorms, but how long will Xanterra need staffers when there are no visitors? Park visitors are our sole economic lifeline here at Yellowstone.

However, coincidentally with the government shutdown is our very own winter shutdown. For the past several weeks, beginning with Roosevelt, its most rustic and highest in elevation facility, Xanterra has been shutting down facilities and preparing them for a long winter’s sleep. Yellowstone needs a rest and quite a few of the facilities are by no means able to house winter visitors.

Xanterra’s shutdown proceeds slowly, with one facility after another closing its doors to visitors.  No visitors, no need for additional personnel. Restaurants close in conjunction with the lodges and inns. No place to eat but no visitors to serve either.  Some of each lodging and restaurant’s staffs begin the “Deep Clean” which takes places at every restaurant facility after closure. As soon as the Deep Clean is done, the front desk people, the housekeepers, the servers, server assistants and cook staff pack up and leave.

A small but important core stay behind after closing to take inventories and winterize the lodging (emptying the water from literally every pipe, shuttering windows susceptible to severe weather, turning off hot water boilers that have been on all summer and so forth). The last facilities to close are the venerable Mammoth Hot Springs and Old Faithful's Snow Lodge, facilities which only close down for a few weeks in order to prepare for the winter visitors.  At all other villages, only a few hardy ‘winterkeepers’ stay at each facility in order to remove the massive amounts of snow from the roofs and take care anything else that comes up until everyone returns the next spring.

Old Faithful and Mammoth stay open until the very last. Here at Mammoth, the Dining Room will close next weekend, leaving only the Terrace Grill, the fast food alternative, open to visitors and any staff that misses their meal at the Employee Dining Room.

I leave in just over two weeks as do all of my seasonal coworkers. The core team of permanent, year-round employees are left to keep paying bills left over from our summer season, to finish inventories and audits and then to handle the needs of our winter season. A small maintenance stays on to affect maintenance plans and repair problems as they arise. But generally Yellowstone, at least for a month, goes into a deep sleep.

So the question for our chief operating manager is whether, and when, to hasten the Xanterra shutdown if the government’s shutdown goes on for a prolonged time.  Do we keep our idle employees on in the hopes the shut down will end soon? What do our employees do when they can’t recreate in the Park? Many of the employees are energetic young men and women.  They can recreate in Xanterra’s two employee facilities, the Employee Pub and the Rec Hall. But the pub is only open after hours. The Rec Hall may become busier than it has been all summer.  But how many of the seasonals will stay on with no certain date for returning to work and a paycheck?

For me and my coworkers in the General Accounting Office, the shut down does not carry the same impact. The accounting and maintenance of the lodging and activity concessionaire goes on even when the facilities are closed.  We will leave according to our contracts. Lucky us. We get Wonderland all to ourselves but we can’t use any of its facilities or walk any of its trails. Well, at least the elk will finally be left alone to do their procreative business.

As of last night at shut down, we were 100% occupied in all facilities until the planned date when the last facility closes its door to visitors. I even have a reservation at Old Faithful Inn, the second oldest lodge in the Park, two nights before the Inn shuts its doors for a long winter sleep. However, this morning, our visitors will be told they have less than 48 hours to leave Wonderland.

It is possible, if the shut down goes on for more than a few days, the Park will prematurely be forced into winter mode.  Perhaps thousands of visitors, many with reservations they have had for many months, will be turned away from the Park. Xanterra will lose millions of dollars in anticipated revenue from those occupancies. There will be some cost savings, of course, as idle employees are released from their contracts but this will be a unplanned and unnecessary blow to Xanterra and its employees.

The closure will also disrupt the economic life of the communities surrounding Yellowstone, causing the early closure of hotels and restaurants and the subsequent unemployment of thousands of persons serving the Park’s visitors from outside the Park. Shut down for Yellowstone is certainly much more than a Ranger padlocking the barrier at the gates.

In the meantime, those of us who remain in a Park with no visitors will continue to leave the light on, hoping for the shut down to end quickly so the Smiths CAN visit for their 50^th Anniversary or the Johnsons CAN make it here for their honeymoon as planned.  I’ve learned that Yellowstone means so much to so very many people. I’ve learned people think of it as their Park. The People’s Park. And now they will be denied entrance. I sincerely hope Congress can reach a compromise which allows business as usual to go on, realizing that the ‘business’ of the Park means so much, much more than dollars and cents to those of us who visit or work here. Congress, you have snatched away our beloved Yellowstone. Congress, we want Wonderland back.