Outside groups have come up with $12,000 to provide minimal custodial services at Zion National Park/Rebecca Latson

A coalition of organizations has come up with $12,000 to provide for minimal visitors services at Zion National Park in Utah for the next week if the partial government shutdown goes on.

While many other national parks in the West are struggling with human waste and garbage that's been accumulating during the partial government shutdown, groups in Utah have donated thousands of dollars to provide for custodial services in Zion Canyon and to keep the park's main visitor center open.

The Zion National Park Forever Project had provided funds for those services this past week, but that money runs out this Saturday. On Friday the group's executive director, Lyman Hafen, told the Traveler that the nonprofit organization, with help from Washington (Utah) County, St. George, Utah, and the state of Utah, had come up with funding to continue the services through January 12.

"This is a new batch of funding to fund basic services, very basic services, in the park," Hafen said during a phone call. "It’s just buying us another week to have the visitor center open and the restrooms open and some custodial service for trash collection and wastes. It’s a very small fraction of the work that (normally) is being done on a January day.”

“The hard fact is that the park is mandated to remain accessible to the public during this shutdown,” he added. "Yet staffing and services are not funded. So the park is left with the Catch 22 of welcoming thousands of visitors a day with the visitor center closed, little or no means to provide sanitation services like restrooms, trash collection, other custodial services, and basically an untenable situation.”  

The official said that from his perspective national parks are very different in their needs and the resources they can turn to. "Here in Zion it works for us to spend some emergency funds that we have in our organization to at least maintain that basic level of services in the canyon, for a period of time. It’s not limitless. We’re taking it a day at a time or a week at a time.”

Zion, with steadily rising visitation in recent years, is the third most visited park in the country. While visitation slacks off in winter, Zion still has been seeing between 6,000 and 10,000 visitors a day, said Hafen.

For the most part, he added, between the services the group has been able to provide and visitor stewardship Zion has avoided the unsightly piles of garbage and human waste that some other parks have been enduring with their maintenance crews furloughed.