As the Forest Service contracts with slashed staff and funding, local communities are stepping up with funding for backcountry trail crews, visitor education campaigns, and management of campsites and trailheads.
“These folks need help. We know how important it is to have a physical human presence out there,” said Dave Ochs, the head of the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association, which is administering $62,500 in local funding to support three seasonal Forest Service employees around Crested Butte. “Let’s help our partners. They are in need and we care very much for our backyard.”
The Gunnison National Forest is not hiring any seasonal workers this summer, leaving a long list of tasks typically done by 12 temporary workers who open trails, handle deferred maintenance, manage trailheads and pit toilets and work with outfitters and guides. Across Colorado, federal land managers are seeing a growing number of staffers who have taken buyouts or been laid off. They also are not hiring seasonal workers who help manage the crush of summer visitors.
This is a scene unfolding across Colorado’s public lands as communities labor to fill gaps left by the sudden retraction of the federal government under the Trump administration.
The National Park Service has closed four of its 10 campgrounds at the 42,000-acre Curecanti National Recreation Area around Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Blue Mesa Reservoir outside Gunnison. A 2018 Park Service report showed Curecanti attracting more than 1 million visitors a year who spent $44.1 million in nearby communities, supporting 551 jobs.
Rocky Mountain National Park has made permanent a timed-entry system to manage crowds. Memorial Day weekend travelers waited 45 minutes to enter Great Sand Dunes National Park. Utah’s national parks are urging summer visitors to “pack patience” along with sunblock and water bottles.
Eagle County and its communities have raised $160,000 to support the Front Country Ranger program, which supports White River National Forest workers managing visitors on public lands in the Eagle River Valley. This year the White River – the most trafficked forest in the country with as many as 20 million annual visitors – has lost 43 full-time employees, a 29% reduction. The forest also is not hiring about 50 seasonal workers.
Last year seasonal workers with the Front Country Rangers, which formed in 2018, removed more than 5,000 pounds of trash from dispersed campsites and extinguished more than 30 abandoned and smoldering campfires. Both Pitkin and Summit counties use local funds to support Forest Service workers.
This year the Sustainable Tourism and Outdoor Recreation Committee in Gunnison County raised $62,500 for backcountry crew members administered by the mountain bike association using funds from The Gunnison Metropolitan Recreation District and Great Outdoors Colorado.
The Gunnison Metropolitan Recreation District – everyone calls it MetRec – began as a special district funded by a local property tax to support local television in the late 1970s. It expanded into parks and recreation programs in the early 2000s and district voters removed it from the limits of TABOR, or the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. Its annual revenue tops $1 million and the Met Rec grants support schools, the local avalanche center, trails arts and sports programs.
In 2024, MetRec awarded $100,000 to the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association and its trail-building Crested Butte Conservation Corps. That funding, along with grants from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, support a Crested Butte trail crew of eight workers who work alongside the backcountry “rec stewards” who are removing hazardous trees, staffing trailheads to make sure visitors know the rules, cleaning up more than 200 newly designated campgrounds around the valley and maintaining signage.
But as the federal government – particularly the Department of Government Efficiency launched by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk – scrutinizes federal contracts, there is concern that the Gunnison National Forest has yet to ink a contract with companies that can empty pit toilets. Without that contract, dozens of toilets across the county will not open. Anyone who remembers locked toilets at trailheads and boat ramps during the early months of the pandemic in 2020 knows that does not stop people from pooping. That could lead to widespread closures of those public lands as the government grapples with serious health and safety concerns.
(Local U.S. Forest Service officials have been ordered not to speak with the media and direct all inquiries to regional and national offices that do not respond beyond saying they have received the request for comment.)
There’s also some concern that if local communities contribute financial support to federal management of public lands, budget-slashing bureaucrats may pinch future funds.
“What if they say ‘See, you don’t need us. You can take care of this,’” Gunnison County Commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels said. The county actually declined to pitch in for the backcountry Forest Service workers, not because of a lack of appreciation for public lands but to save funding for health and human services that could be slashed as the federal government shrinks.
Local budgets – even in communities where second homeowners pay big property tax bills – feel the strain of funding public land management, Daniels said.
“I don’t want to create the case for the federal government to divest,” she said. “We just don’t have the income the federal government does to absorb the magnitude of this work for very long at all even with the help of our partners. We can do this as a Band-Aid but we don’t have the funding streams to do it for the long term.”
Pitkin County is supporting two backcountry rangers through the county’s sheriff’s office, giving the rangers the ability to enforce rules around fires and reservations in heavily-trafficked zones. Pitkin County Commissioner Patti Clapper is not too troubled by setting a precedent for local-over-federal funding of public lands because the county – like Eagle, Gunnison and Summit counties – has been supporting seasonal Forest Service workers for several years.
“We see this more of a continuation of efforts we have done in the past to maintain our focus on public safety and forest safety,” Clapper said.
Eagle County and its towns launched its Front Country Ranger program in 2018 as “a way to enhance support for the Forest Service,” said Marcia Gilles, Eagle County’s first director of open space and natural resources, who spent more than two decades working for the Forest Service and Park Service.
“The Front Country Rangers was about enhancing a seasonal program we considered underfunded and now we are the sole support system,” Gilles said. “If it was not for this program, we would not have anyone out in a forest that sees 18 million to 20 million visitors a year.”
While Eagle, Gunnison, Pitkin and Summit counties are well-positioned to weather the loss of staff in public lands, the counties’ seasonal programs “are not sustainable,” Gilles said.
“It’s a stewardship responsibility of the federal government to support the Forest Service management,” she said. “We do have a recognition that there is a community-level need for support as well. This is about stewardship and partnership.”
Still, Daniels worries that local funding could lead a newly overhauled federal government to scale back support for public lands. That would create a patchwork of management policy that may hinder access and injure wildlife and habitat.
“If this becomes a state and county or regional management system, we could see a huge breakdown in what public lands mean,” Daniels said.
