How the Lay off’s Affect staffing along each trail

I came across an article posted yesterday (Feb 27th) from SFGATE by Kylie Mohr.  The original article is linked here.

In the article, an Anonymous Park Ranger provided a crowdsourced list of all the layoff’s in various national parks.  The list is growing and ever changing, but if you are about to embark on a Thru Hike like me, there is a lot of anxiety about these lay off’s.

The Park Rangers and their fellow National Parks staff help to keep us safe, and help to maintain the trails that we are hiking.  It is a tight knit community that offers a lot of support to our Subculture.  How these layoff’s affect us is massive, and can be the make it or break it line to us deciding to actually hike.  I would interested in how many Thru Hikers that registered for a hike, and then no showed at Amnicola to pick up their badge as a result of these developments.

This year, with a record low in thru hiker registrations on the AT, every single one of us are feeling the squish.  This year, more so than in prior years, we need to band together and watch out for each other.  I only have data from my registration for the number of thru hikers leaving on the AT, but a lot of us are leaving within the week!

Without further ado… the parks listed in the original article’s lay0ffs, by Trail:

AT

Great Smokey Mountains – unlisted

Shenandoah National Park – 15 employees

CDT

Glacier National Park – 2 employees

Yellowstone National Park – 7 employees

PCT

Crater Lake – 1 employee

Kings Canyon – unlisted

Lassen Volcanic – unlisted

Mt. Rainer – 10 employees

North Cascades – 6 employees

Sequoia – unlisted

Yosemite – 9 employees

As a reminder, there are also over a 100 Wilderness areas and National Forests that these trails go through as well, which fall under different departments.  Some of those departments are not reporting to our Rogue Park Ranger, and some National Parks might be represented on the spreadsheet yet.