National Parks Deal with Damage After Government Shutdown

01Many of America's national parks remained open during the country's longest ever government shutdown.

02But few had enough National Park Service employees working to protect the areas and keep watch of visitors.

03Those visitors did a lot of damage in 35 days.

04They walked over sensitive lands.

05They opened gates while no one was watching.

06One person even struck one of California's famous Joshua trees with a vehicle.

07When Park Service employees returned to work last week, they began cleaning up and repairing what they could.

08But environmental experts warn that the damage in some places could take years to recover.

09Even before the shutdown, national parks faced $12 billion in much-needed repair work.

10That number has only grown.

11Many parks had no employees working during the shutdown.

12Others had skeleton crews.

13Local governments and nonprofit organizations offered money and volunteers during the shutdown, which began on December 21st and ended on January 25th.

14National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst told reporters that the damage was not widespread.

15He said most visitors took good care of the land.

16But interviews with park officials and nonprofit groups that help keep parks running tell a different story.

17Angie Richman is a spokeswoman at Arches National Park in Utah.

18She said visitors left human waste outside a bathroom, walked on trails within an area that was off-limits to visitors, and damaged an entrance gate.

19At Joshua Tree National Park, an off-road vehicle ran over one of the park's special trees.

20Several other Joshua trees were damaged, including one that was spray-painted.

21A former Joshua Tree National Park ranger told Smithsonian.com that it could take 200 to 300 years for the park to fully recover from the shutdown damage.

22At Great Smoky Mountains National Park, visitors cut locks on some gates to closed roads and stole about $5,000 in repair tools, spokeswoman Dana Sohn said.

23Employees at Death Valley National Park in California found human waste and toilet paper all across the desert.

24Park officials also found evidence of people kicking in locked bathroom doors.

25And a high-speed video on Death Valley's Facebook page shows how it took staffers two hours to clean a bathroom overflowing with trash and covered with waste.

26Workers at Death Valley National Park must replant in areas damaged by off-road vehicles.

27All of this delays much-needed repairs in other areas of the 1.3 million hectare park.

28David Blacker is chief of the Death Valley Natural History Association.

29He told the Associated Press, It became pretty depressing the kinds of things people will do when they are unsupervised.

30At some parks, the lack of people meant animals moved in.

31A colony of elephant seals took over a northern California beach in Point Reyes National Seashore.

32There were no workers there to prevent the animals from gathering in the popular tourist area.

33Park rangers and volunteers are now leading small groups of visitors to safely see the seals and their young.

34The possibility of another shutdown remains.

35President Donald Trump and congressional leaders agreed to a temporary spending bill that reopened the government for three weeks.

36Trump has said another shutdown could start February 15th if he and Democratic leaders cannot agree on money for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

37I'm Ashley Thompson.