From his perch on the 3,000-foot wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, Charles Winstead heard the unexpected whoosh of a BASE jumper’s parachute and looked up.

“I turned on my camera, and, sure enough, there was a couple more, and then a couple more and a couple more,” said Winstead, 57, a rock climber who has been ascending El Capitan for much of this month.

And that was just on Oct. 1, the first day of the government shutdown. In a cellphone interview Friday from about 1,000 feet up, he said he had seen roughly 20 jumps so far.

BASE Jumpers Seize the Opportunity

BASE jumping, in which participants parachute off fixed objects such as buildings or cliffs, is illegal in Yosemite and all 62 other national parks because of “the significant safety risks it poses to participants, the public and first responders,” the National Park Service said in a statement.

But as the shutdown heads into its fourth week, the adventure sport has become a symbol of the chaos that park employees and other experts fear might take hold as major parks are left open to the public while much of their staff is furloughed.

Yosemite was the sixth-most-popular national park last year, with more than 4.1 million visitors.

BASE jumping has long happened in the park despite the rules against it, but the brazenness of jumpers during the shutdown is what struck Elisabeth Barton, a cofounder of Echo Adventure Cooperative, a guiding service in Yosemite. While in the past, jumps took place mostly at dawn or dusk, when fewer people were around, now people were jumping “at noon instead of 6 in the morning,” Barton said.

“Is it any more legal right now? No, not at all,” she added. “They’re just less likely to get caught or at least there’s that assumption.”

In a video Winstead shot from El Capitan, a voice in the background says, with an expletive, “Right in the middle of the meadow, that’s insane!” as a jumper touches down in the heart of Yosemite Valley, the busiest part of the park.

The park service said there had been “three reported and documented BASE jumping complaints” in Yosemite since the shutdown began but declined to comment further on those incidents, citing active investigations. It added that all law enforcement officers were on duty and “are responding to incidents as they normally would.” BASE jumpers can face a fine of up to $5,000 and six months in jail if they’re convicted.

Traversing Half Dome Without Permits

The permit-only hike up the cables on the back of Half Dome has also emerged as an area of concern during the shutdown. The permit requirement for that hike, a steep climb on an exposed rock face that is susceptible to sudden extreme weather, provides crowd control and helps officials understand who is on the mountain in case of an emergency. Permits are in such demand that the park uses a lottery system to distribute them.

Barton said more than a dozen customers in recent weeks had questioned whether they could get away with climbing Half Dome without a permit during the shutdown, a question “essentially nobody asked” before this month. She added that at least two people told her they made the ascent without anyone checking their permits during the first week of the shutdown.

“When you have a lot of people who may not have won the lottery and didn’t get a permit this year, who are now using the shutdown as an excuse to go do a hike like that, it’s putting themselves and others at risk,” said Mark Rose, the Sierra Nevada senior program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association.

The park service said permit enforcement at Half Dome has continued during the shutdown, and the park’s search and rescue team is fully operational, said Cory Goehring, a senior naturalist at the Yosemite Conservancy, the park’s nonprofit partner.

Illegal Drone Use Ramps Up

Drones, which are illegal in the park, have also appeared more often during the shutdown, said Barton, adding that her staff had spotted them as many as seven times a day since the shutdown began, up from about once a week. Drone use in the park is a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of $5,000 and six months in jail.

More than 35 former park superintendents last month urged the Interior Department to close national parks until the government reopens, citing reports of damage that occurred during the last shutdown. A few states, including Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia, are paying to keep some visitor services at their national parks open during the shutdown.

Despite the challenges, Goehring said that he had seen visitors stepping up to be good stewards, collecting trash and offering advice to other tourists. Very few visitors, he said, were there to cause trouble.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Gabe Castro-Root

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