WEST GLACIER, Mont. – Traffic slows to a crawl at the Weeping Wall on Glacier Park's famous Going to the Sun Road. Tourists lean out windows to snap pictures of the steady stream of melting snow tumbling over a small band of cliffs onto the road ringed by towering high alpine peaks and even bigger waterfalls.
At a turnout near Logan Pass, Michelle Gross, visiting from Dallas, is taking it all in.
"We live in a congested city so getting out in nature is just really special," she says.
Glacier set a record for visitors in May. Many other parks have notched similar records amid an explosion of visitation in recent years. All of this comes as major parks like Glacier lost an estimated 25% of their permanent staff due to President Trump's DOGE cuts, buyouts and a hiring freeze at federal agencies earlier this year. Headlines have subsequently been warning that many parks are ill equipped to handle millions of tourists. But Gross's visit is going smoothly.
"It seems like it's very well maintained, the bathrooms we went to here yesterday were nice," she says. "Hopefully it's not an issue."
To Russ Laraway, who's showing off the park to friends visiting from Philadelphia, it feels like a typical July day up here. He's visited several times since the park implemented a reservation system to control traffic at peak times. And he says he's not seeing any disruption or fallout from the reported staffing cuts.
"I couldn't tell you that they happened based on our experience," Laraway says. "I could tell you that they happened 'cause it's on the news."
But longtime park staff and watchdog groups like the National Parks Conservation Association say this is all by design.
"What I've been likening it to is, it's this facade of a park experience this summer," says Sarah Lundstrum, the association's Glacier program manager. "You're walking down the street, it's like you're in a Hollywood movie set and everything looks great but there's not much behind it."
Lundstrum says the Park Service has lately received money to hire more seasonal rangers. So with the public facing staff mostly in place, things seem normal. Yellowstone National Park reported it was at full seasonal staff this summer. But Lundstrum says in the back offices, it's a far different situation. Everything from infrastructure improvements to wildlife studies to hiring next year's seasonal workers isn't getting done. She says if things aren't turned around at Glacier, park visitors next summer will encounter a far different experience.
"There is no deputy superintendent, there is an acting chief ranger, they're missing an electrician," Lundstrum says.
Behind the scenes, the Park Service is struggling
Glacier did not make its park superintendent available for an interview. The National Park Service and its parent agency the Department of Interior have declined repeated NPR interview requests since President Trump was inaugurated.
The park service doesn't have a Senate-confirmed director or even a nominee. In an emailed statement, they said their employees are experienced problem solvers who adapt to changing conditions and are "focused on delivering high quality experiences for every visitor."
"Nobody is quite sure what the plan is," says Jeff Mow, who retired from a career in the park service in 2022.
His last nine year stint was as park superintendent of Glacier.
"They certainly didn't come in with anything that seemed to have a plan to it because we saw where a number of people were fired and then rehired," Mow says.
For now, one plan appears to be to keep cutting the budget. Trump wants to cut more than a billion more dollars from the park service next year and has floated selling off smaller monuments and heritage sites. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told a Senate committee in May they are trying to cut park bureaucracy and get more people working in the parks themselves.
"I want more people in the parks, whether they're driving a snowplow in the winter time, or whether they're working as an interpreter in the summer time, or they're doing trail work or firefighting, I want more of that," Burgum said. "I want less overhead."
Both Democratic and Republican Senators on the committee were skeptical. Mow said that "overhead" is necessary and that smaller national parks rely heavily on regional offices to share staff like archeologists, wildlife biologists and firefighters.
"While the secretary speaks to regional offices and 'I'm not even sure what those people do,' I think it's because he never asked the question," Mow says.
In background interviews, employees at parks and non profits who work close with them describe a chilling climate in the back offices of national parks right now. They say staff are under orders to not talk publicly about any of the effects of the DOGE cuts or face getting fired.
Many who remain are working overtime or doing two or more jobs.
In Glacier, one river ranger is now also in charge of patrolling wilderness trails. Volunteers are trying to police illegal camping and doing traffic control. Local raft guides are cleaning bathrooms along the park's southern boundary.
The tourism industry is worried
What's happening behind the scenes this summer is not new, however, more like the culmination of a years-long crisis. The National Park Service itself has for years warned of a looming crisis especially with a daunting infrastructure maintenance backlog at a time when many parks are seeing an explosion of visitors.
National Parks are huge economic engines for rural regions in particular. Many tourism leaders in gateway towns near them are worried tourists will start going elsewhere if the park experience or its environment gets eroded.
"When you start to put a strain on the park system then the visitor experience suffers," says Zak Anderson, executive director of Explore Whitefish, a local tourism bureau.
Whitefish has reported a drop in its largest international market this summer - Canada. But Anderson says it's been offset some by an increase in domestic tourists. Though many are booking at the last minute.
"The community is trying to do its best to cope with a busy summer season amidst economic uncertainty," Anderson says.
Glacier National Park is forecast to set another visitation record this month. One afternoon, during the now common gridlock at rush hour leaving the park, Rick Murphy stood at a protest on the side of the highway organized by local progressives on the day the U.S. Senate voted on Trump's rescission bill. He held a sign decrying Trump's national parks cuts.
"Even if we eventually get back to some reasonable support of the park, a lot of that institutional knowledge, at lot of those recorded facts are going to disappear and we're going to be starting from scratch," Murphy says.
Murphy, who's been a park volunteer for fifteen years, says he's worried the cuts have already done irreparable damage to some of this country's most cherished public lands.
This story is part of American Voices, an occasional NPR National Desk series that explores how President Trump's early policies are playing out across the country.
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