My heart stopped as I looked down from my position atop Yosemite’s Half Dome and watched Diana’s grip slip from the metal cables. As lightning illuminated the dark, cloudy sky and rain slashed onto the now ice-slick granite face, I was hanging vertically, 8,830 feet in the air, fearing for my life. Simultaneously, down on the valley floor, a team from Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) was preparing to evacuate us. Help was on the way.
That fearful day started with excitement. I awoke before dawn with my three siblings and my dad—an experienced hunter and hiker—to embark on our journey toward the iconic mountain. Weather reports predicted a perfect day, but clouds had begun forming about an half hour after we reached the top. The rain instantly turned from a light drizzle to a torrential downpour. We raced to go down, and Adam and Diana, a Czech couple, went first. They did not have harnesses to hook onto the metal cables, so when Diana slipped, it was a miracle that Adam quickly reacted to catch her. In that moment, we determined it was too dangerous to continue and made our way back up the mountain. For the next ten hours, we took refuge in a rock formation that doubled as a cave with Adam, Diana, Florian from Germany, and Lori from Pasadena. The rest of my family was safe in another cave. When the YOSAR team arrived, they spared no time in rappelling us down the shoulder of Half Dome, a technical art completed with ease by world-class professionals. Upon securing all 13 of us to safety, they wished us luck on the trail and raced in the direction of the valley floor, off to help others.
The selfless men and women of the Yosemite National Park Service put their lives on the line for the public. Their livelihoods—and the vital service they provide—are now threatened under the Trump Administration.
For Alec Murray, it was a labor of love. The ultimate tree-hugger and consummate public servant, Alec occupied the role of custodian in Yosemite National Park for almost ten months. A day’s work consisted of menial tasks: mopping urine from bathrooms, picking up beer bottles and diapers on the route leading to the park’s entrance, and/or using a septic pump truck to extract human feces from park porta potties. His salary was $40,000 a year, before taxes. Suffice to say, this was work few desired, but Alec did it as a way to get his foot in the door—a stepping stone to achieving his lifelong dream of becoming a National Park Service Ranger. He had worked in 25 to 30 other places in his life, but he wanted Yosemite to be his forever job. “I wanted to work in the best park system in the world,” he told me. Alec’s dream was shattered three weeks ago with one email. “I was informed, along with 1,000 others, that our work was deemed unsatisfactory.” He had been laid off as part of a mass termination of National Park Service employees across the country—a purge that has since come to be known among fired NPS employees as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. “In my time in the role,” Alec told me, “I had only ever had official performance evaluations that showed I exceeded expectations.” When asked what message this sends to current and future public servants, he bluntly stated, “Even tenured employees are on the chopping block. Nobody is safe.”
Alec’s firing in Yosemite is a microcosm of what is happening across the country: the haphazard expulsion of probationary employees awaiting tenured positions in our nation’s parks. According to an unofficial Excel spreadsheet compiled by park rangers and employees nationwide, nine probationary employees in Yosemite were terminated from their positions. As of March 14th, ProPublica reports that the Trump administration has purged at least 1,000 from the National Parks Service nationwide. The timing for this purge was far from ideal.
At a time when National Parks and Monuments have seen a 20% increase in visitors, this move threatens the parks’ ability to safely provide a respite to the guests who venture into these natural spaces 325.5 million people visited the United States’ 63 national parks in 2024, with Yosemite being the sixth-most visited. When I asked Alec about the implications of these firings for park operations, he mentioned “an increase in trash, for one,” but said he felt “our national parks have never been threatened like this before.” Alec wasn’t the only critical employee fired by President Trump.
Nate Vince was Yosemite’s only locksmith. On that same February 14th, he received an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel and Management informing him of his termination. When Vince received notice he was fired, he was only three weeks away from becoming a civil servant after finishing his year-long probationary period. Only an act of Congress was able to fire him at this point. Telling him he “lacked the skills, knowledge, and capability” to perform his work as the only locksmith in the park, Vince knew these cuts were not a methodical and precise way to fire low-performing and substandard government employees, but instead a grossly chaotic slice-and-dice of real people whose families depended on their employment for their well-being and future. Mr. Vince was an apprentice to the former locksmith for four years, never once received a complaint or call-back, and won multiple awards for his exemplary work, work that is critical to the park’s operations. Not only was he in charge of all the locksmith for every building of every department: administration, search and rescue, rangers, facilities, etc., in a park the size of Rhode Island, but he also handled wide-ranging handyman duties. “Every work group relies on me, so [my laying off] affects every work group,” he explained to me over the phone. “I have been, on more than one occasion, the first on the scene when people get injured.”
Mr. Nate Vince’s job was all-encompassing and clearly demanding, but he didn’t mind. He told me he did it for his love of the environment, of Yosemite, and for the people who come to experience everything it has to offer. He is now scared for the future of Yosemite. “With what we are seeing—this rift, this crippling of the workforce en masse—I am seriously worried for the future of the Park Service and the land they care for.”
Even the safety of the forests of Yosemite is in jeopardy. Jackie Rapport was a forest restoration worker with the National Park Service but is hoping to become a permanent firefighter. She was a part of a team that dealt with fuel reduction, strategically removing flammable vegetation ahead of drier months. “We were the Swiss Army Knife of fuel reduction,” she said buoyantly, and told me she loved everything about her line of work. After attending fire school in Boise, Idaho, she was working 50 hours a week in her role as a forest restoration worker and also volunteering to fight structure fires within Yosemite Valley.
Now, surrounded by the federal firings at Yosemite just as her restoration contract ends, she clings to hope for a permanent NPS firefighting position but is stuck in a perpetual state of limbo. Over our hour of conversation, she explained how she struggles to pay for basic necessities like food and rent. For the parks, the stress of tight financial decisions does not just extend to staffing. Jackie described how YOSAR could not purchase a helicopter for the upcoming summer season because of a cap on any purchases over $50,000. This was done by the Department of Government Efficiency. She also told me the tragic story of her friend, a low-paid wildlife biologist devoted to park animal rescue, who was also fired for the same reason as Olek and Nate: unsatisfactory work performance. “These people do the work not to get rich but because they love it, because they want to preserve and protect this special place for all Americans.”
All facets of the park are being reoriented, but not without opposition. In the days and weeks that followed the terminations, hundreds of National Park Service employees sought to oppose the new administration’s actions. NPS employees in Yosemite hung the American flag upside down as a call to action for citizens to recognize the threats to public lands. Over 500 environmental groups wrote letters to Congress in defiance of the worker reductions, and a rogue coalition of 800 off-duty rangers known as “Resistance Rangers” organized protests at over 140 national parks. These NPS workers are not going to go quietly into the night.
Two weeks ago, the vigilante park service employees had reason to celebrate when two federal judges in California and Maryland deemed the agency-wide firings, done by the Office of Management and Budget, unlawful in their directive. This included the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service. U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco specifically cited the arbitrary nature and lack of due process in the terminations. “It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said in his statement. “That should not have been done in our country. It was a sham in order to avoid statutory requirements.”
All employees subject to the Valentine’s Day Massacre have since been reinstated, including Olek and Nate, and there have been positive signs in seasonal hirings for people like Jackie, with others noting back pay appearing in their bank accounts. Yet, the joy quickly subsided once reporting showed that a large swath of the reinstated employees were immediately placed on administrative leave. Although the government said it was the first step in returning probationary employees to their posts, this move has left NPS employees apprehensive about their future, once again.
I spoke with Alec a second time, following the court’s decision. Alec described that the ongoing litigation with his reinstatement had made it difficult for him to know his future. “I want to stay, but I don’t know if I can.”
When I asked him what message he has for the Trump Administration, he was crystal clear in his answer: “We are carpenters, we are custodians, we are biologists. We are families, and we are those who laugh about being paid in sunsets, since the paychecks never are enough. We’re tired of being political targets.”
Beloved American mountaineer John Muir is often credited for calling Yosemite the “crown jewel” of the National Park System, and in 1983, the famed environmentalist Wallace Stegner enthusiastically said: “The national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” With the rapid damage being done to one of America’s most cherished parks and the people dedicated to protecting it, it is not long before this jewel could fall from America’s crown.
Author’s Note: Some names have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals involved, and all, including but not limited to Mr. Nate Vince, were interviewed before being rehired as employees of the Department of the Interior.
Featured Image Source: NBC News