A tangled mess of twigs, limbs and trunks covered the trail intersection so thoroughly that we weren’t even sure we’d reached it. Weary from an uphill climb in mid-August heat, our group — four adults, three kids, four llamas and two panting dogs — stopped in a nearby clearing. My husband set off to scout the best path forward.
We’d expected to encounter downed trees during our annual llama packing trip into the Bridger-Teton National Forest in western Wyoming. Even when the forest is fully staffed, crews can’t clear all the timber from all the trails in its more than 1.3 million acres of wilderness. And we knew that, in the summer of 2025, the Forest Service was far from fully staffed.
We found our route but advanced only a few hundred yards before encountering an impassable logjam. The dense forests on either side meant that we couldn’t go around it, only through. One of our group searched the panniers carried by an unimpressed-looking llama named Professor Tricia and fished out two handsaws. While the kids snacked, the adults took turns sawing — back and forth, back and forth.
A grand adventure, we agreed. After about 20 minutes, we reopened the path, celebrating with jubilant high-fives.
Forty yards later, though, we encountered a similar mess — only these trees were even bigger. The adults in our group each had decades of experience in Wyoming’s mountains, but the condition of this trail was unlike anything we’d ever seen.
Our trip, we feared, was becoming yet another casualty of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which President Donald Trump had established, with soon-to-be trillionaire Elon Musk at its head, in January 2025. As of last summer, Musk had haphazardly fired and forced out at least 5,860 Forest Service employees.
“Should we send Elon a bill?” one of our group joked as he sawed his way through a massive lodgepole pine. It was well past noon, and the night’s camp was still 7 or 8 miles — and who knew how many hours of sawing — away.
It seemed like a fitting metaphor for the time and place.
The Bridger-Teton, one of the six national forests that surround Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, is part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a term coined by grizzly bear researchers Frank and John Craighead in the 1970s. Encompassing more than 30,000 square miles of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, the ecosystem lies within the ancestral territories of the Shoshone, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfeet, Nez Perce and Bannock tribes and includes the nation’s first national park, the first national forest, the seventh-largest reservation, three national wildlife refuges and nearly a dozen sprawling wilderness areas. Forests, grasslands and sagebrush steppe on public, private and tribal land support the world’s longest documented mule deer migration, the second-largest population of grizzly bears in the Lower 48, and one of the first two populations of gray wolves reintroduced in the United States.
These habitats are under intense pressure from climate change, development and millions of annual visitors. But the federal scientists and land managers in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have long received more funding than their counterparts elsewhere. As a result, the region’s large mammals are among the world’s best-studied; its parks are better staffed than most others; and it has, at least historically, benefited from an unprecedented level of interagency collaboration. If any ecosystem can survive multiple rounds of budget cuts and mass firings, it’s this one.
Since my trip to the Bridger-Teton, however, I’ve asked dozens of people who live and work in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem what the future holds for this landscape, and for the rest of the West’s public lands. What happens to an ecosystem when its best-resourced stewards — in this case, the federal agencies — are taken out at the knees?
“It’s hard to say that in one season everything has fallen apart. So many partner groups have stepped in, and outfitters have stepped up,” said Peggie dePasquale, who worked as a wilderness ranger in the Bridger-Teton National Forest before DOGE fired her last year. “But what we’re looking at is a long-term deterioration of what we love. And once we lose it, and the degradation happens, it will be hard to reverse.”
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MANY FEDERAL EMPLOYEES suspected that life would be more difficult in the second Trump administration than during the first. But none fully anticipated what came to be known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre.
On Feb. 14, 2025, thousands of probationary employees at the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and other agencies were notified by email that they had been terminated, effective immediately. The cuts continued sporadically for the next few months. By the end of September, the Forest Service had lost 16% of its workforce through buyouts and firings. The National Park Service lost at least 24% of its permanent staff, even at flagship parks like Grand Teton. The Bureau of Land Management lost more than 32%.
By May 2025, Scott Jackson, the leader of the Forest Service’s National Carnivore Program, knew his meso-carnivore monitoring project was doomed. The Trump administration had deprioritized the agency’s research, shifting its focus toward logging and extraction. Officials in the agency’s Northern Region office in Missoula, Montana, told Jackson that their 2025 budget lacked money for the project and that it would need to be shut down. So, bit by bit, Jackson and his team got rid of everything: the refurbished snowmobiles they used to track wolverines and lynx in the high mountain snow, the avalanche beacons and shovels that kept researchers safe, and the DNA kits used to assess populations of elusive carnivores.For the first time in years, Jackson didn’t post job announcements for winter technician positions. In early August, Jackson said goodbye to the project’s leader, whose annual contract hadn’t been renewed.
“What we’re looking at is a long-term deterioration of what we love. And once we lose it, and the degradation happens, it will be hard to reverse.”
The project, a decade-long effort to understand how the Rockies’ lynx, wolverine, fishers and other carnivores were faring in the face of climate and forest changes, had always run on a shoestring.
By fall 2025, it wasn’t running at all.
Jackson retired at the end of August, earlier than he’d planned. After a 40-year career, he said, he was no longer willing to endure the frustration and uncertainty created by the Trump administration. While he hopes that a future administration will revive the project, he knows that restarting it will be expensive, and he worries that without concerted monitoring, the lesser-known carnivores he studied will simply fade from public view.
“It’s sad, and it’s enough to really piss a lot of people off, myself included,” he said.
Over the past year, status updates on federal research projects in the Yellowstone region and much of the West have read like so many obituaries.
Trail-cam photos, clockwise from top left: A coyote passes by a trail camera in Plummer Canyon in the Jedediah Smith Wilderness, Caribou-Targhee National Forest, Wyoming. An elk is seen on a trail camera in the Gros Ventre Range, Wyoming. A grizzly bear on a trail popular with horsemen near Togwotee Pass east of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. Mule deer in Plummer Canyon. Natalie Behring
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit, housed at the University of Wyoming, connects wildlife managers at Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department with university wildlife researchers. Graduate students and research scientists funded by the unit have helped map big game migrations across the West, including the epic mule deer migration that pulses in and out of the Yellowstone region and the elk migrations that sustain the large carnivores critical to the ecosystem. The unit also oversees research on sagebrush songbirds, prairie fish, and other species that depend on Yellowstone habitats.
The co-op unit at the University of Wyoming is one of 44 units in universities across the country, a research network popular in blue and red states alike. So when the Trump administration proposed cutting all funding for the agency’s Ecosystems Mission Area, which includes the co-op units, Congress pushed back.
The White House Office of Management and Budget backed off on the proposed cuts, then required unit researchers to get its approval before spending money on anything other than USGS employee salaries. But well over a year later, money already appropriated by Congress was still waiting for White House approval to be spent, said Jerod Merkle, a University of Wyoming professor who frequently partners with the university’s co-op unit on wildlife projects. That meant no USGS money was available for the helicopters used to capture and study mule deer, the collars that monitor their movements, or the graduate students and research scientists who analyze the data collected on migration and disease transmission. Though Merkle and his colleagues pieced together enough state and nonprofit funding to continue much of their work, some projects stalled.
While existing projects have suffered, planned projects have never gotten off the ground.
In October 2024, just before finishing his Ph.D., Niall Clancy accepted a position with the University of Idaho to create a nongame fisheries program for the state’s Fish and Game Department. He saw it as an opportunity to protect native fish throughout the state, including those that live in the drainages sustained by the Yellowstone region’s snowpack. “If we’re taking care of the whole ecosystem, which is supposed to be the point here, and you’re only focusing on the game species, you’re missing half that mission,” Clancy said. State-level research on nongame fish should have bipartisan support, he added, since it can both benefit biodiversity and reduce the need for federal threatened and endangered species listings.
But in early 2025, the funding that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service routinely allocates to states for wildlife conservation was held up by the administration. The state responded to the shortfall by placing many new programs on hold, including Clancy’s.
Clancy spent much of 2025 working as a fisheries technician for the University of Wyoming, hoping that the federal money would come through and free up state funds for his Idaho position. In December, he began teaching fisheries classes at Salish Kootenai College, a tribal college in Montana. (USDA grants to tribal colleges were also in DOGE’s crosshairs even after years of inadequate funding.)
“Nobody can plan anything, because no one knows if the funding will still be there,” said Clancy, who is not Indigenous.
For decades, the Forest Service convened biologists, managers, tribal representatives, conservationists and politicians from around the Western U.S. for a week of discussions in the Lamar Valley, a place famous for its plentiful wolves, bears, bison and elk. The gathering, which included a range of agencies and research disciplines, addressed issues as broad as climate change and visitor management and as targeted as grizzly bear conflict resolution, highway crossings and private-land development. It was a point of pride for many in the Forest Service, including Jackson, who saw it as a way to strengthen the relationship between science and management in Yellowstone and beyond. After a five-year hiatus during the pandemic, the event was revived in 2024, shortly before the administration changed hands.
By early 2025, as funding freezes and cuts trickled down to regional offices, the Lamar Valley gathering went the way of Jackson’s snowmobiles.
CUTS AT THE FOREST SERVICE and other agencies left land managers shorthanded, too. The neglected trails we encountered during our llama-packing trip were no exception: An internal Forest Service memo leaked to The Washington Post and RE:PUBLIC late last year reported that the number of trail miles maintained in 2025 was 22% below average — the lowest in 15 years.
Some ranger districts lost their entire trail staff. The Bridger-Teton lost its three-
person wilderness crew, including ranger Peggie dePasquale. For two years, dePasquale worked from mid-spring through mid-fall, checking on outfitters and other groups in the backcountry and digging drainages to protect trails from erosion. Despite having a master’s degree and years of experience with environmental nonprofits and in environmental education, she accepted the $18-per-hour position, she said, because she wanted nothing more than to be outside and to help the public understand wilderness stewardship. She wanted people to fall in love with the region, like she had, and to care about it as much as she did.
In 2024, the Biden administration moved dePasquale and more than a thousand other seasonal Forest Service employees into permanent roles, which enabled them to return to work each year without reapplying, though it also froze hiring for many more seasonal employees. The move gave these workers more security, but when Trump began his second term, they still had “probationary” status because they had been permanent employees less than a year. On Feb. 14, 2025, these former seasonals along with most other probationary federal employees were abruptly fired.
The layoffs left trails covered in fallen logs, while toilets remained locked or overflowing. And some recreationists took advantage of the turmoil to ignore the rules.
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One Bridger-Teton ranger told me, speaking anonymously because they were still employed, that they wrote more citations last summer than ever before. One night in July, they ticketed five groups for lighting campfires during a fire ban.
“People weren’t quite as respectful as they’ve been in the past,” the ranger said. “Do I personally believe the way the administration handled things led to that? Yeah, I do.”
While Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks faced fewer layoffs than some of their smaller, lesser-known counterparts, Grand Teton, which normally runs around a 6% to 8% vacancy rate, is now missing a quarter of its permanent staff, said Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins,citing the deferred resignations and retirements spurred by DOGE. Under Trump’s Executive Order 14210, which dictates that most federal agencies can hire no more than “one employee for every four employees that depart,” Jenkins must leave most of these permanent positions unfilled.
“Nobody can plan anything, because no one knows if the funding will still be there.”
Visitors to the park this summer may not notice any difference; Jenkins expects to have a full complement of seasonals to maintain trails and toilets, staff visitor centers and collect entrance fees. But over time, said Jenkins, the shortage of administrative support, construction and restoration project managers and IT specialists could lead to communication system failures among emergency responders; delayed or stalled maintenance projects for wastewater treatment systems or roads; and more people pulled out of the field to help with administrative functions.
The layoffs and budget cuts at other agencies affect the parks, too, said Jenkins. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has a 60-year history of cooperation through the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, which includes scientists and managers from the Park Service, Forest Service, BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service. Committee members work across boundaries to prevent or slow the spread of invasive species, track wildlife health and conserve riparian habitat. More recently, the committee has expanded to include representatives from state wildlife agencies, a move led by former Wyoming Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik, now director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
This regionwide coordination “takes time and energy from people,” said Jenkins. “As you have turnover, if you don’t make it a priority, it won’t happen.”
The dramatic reductions in agency personnel and funding over the past year have been chaotic and damaging, but most people I spoke with emphasized the fact that the Forest Service and BLM in particular were already struggling, forced to operate on smaller and smaller budgets and with fewer and fewer employees for decades. National wildlife refuges, for example, have a third fewer staff than they did in 2010. Only seven of Wyoming’s 13 wilderness areas had rangers in 2024; now, rangers patrol just two, said dePasquale.
“We were already bare bones before these terminations and forced retirements,” said dePasquale, now the national forest wildlands director for the Wyoming Wilderness Association. “This is not ‘one morning we woke up and this was gone.’ This has been a systematic defunding of public lands for years and years.”
ON A CHILLY DAY in late November, the mid-morning sun illuminated buffalo grass and the dried pods of last season’s milkweed. Bison reluctantly moved out of the way as our truck groaned slowly down a dirt road on the edge of a plateau. In the driver’s seat, Wes Martel said a quick prayer to a golden eagle as it glided into the valley below.
Martel and I were driving through the Eastern Shoshone buffalo herd, which the tribe established in 2016 on the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming. The Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho share the reservation, a 2.2-million-acre expanse of mountains and plains roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park. Martel likes to say the reservation has everything Yellowstone National Park has except Old Faithful. Then he laughs. Martel laughs a lot; he says it gets him through the hard times.
The reservation, which lies southeast of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and borders the Bridger-Teton and Shoshone national forests, is home to 265 lakes and more than 1,000 miles of rivers and streams. In the 1930s, three decades before Congress passed the Wilderness Act, the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho declared that 138,000 acres of the Wind River Range would remain roadless. This roadless land, along with the rest of the reservation, provides crucial habitat for many of the species that migrate in and out of the parks and forests, from mule deer and pronghorn to wolves and grizzly bears.
“We are protecting our cultural and spiritual attachment to Mother Earth, our second mother,” he said. This landscape is “where we feel most comfortable and blessed. It’s life itself.”
The reservation is also full of monuments to the federal government’s broken promises. Given this history, the current administration’s actions came as no surprise to the tribes, said Martel, an enrolled member of the Shoshone Tribe who works as the senior Wind River conservation associate for the nonprofit Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
The Eastern Shoshone’s first treaty with the U.S. government, signed by Shoshone Chief Washakie in 1863, reserved some 44 million acres for the tribe, which retained its right to “hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States.” The treaty “wasn’t a grant of rights to us, it was a grant of rights from us,” said Martel, who served on the Eastern Shoshone Business Council and as the chairman of the tribal Fish and Game Committee for 20 years.
“But it only took them five years to violate the 1863 treaty,” Martel said, and shrink the reservation to 3.2 million acres. In 1875, the government carved another 700,000 acres out of the southern end of the reservation so that incoming prospectors could mine for gold in the South Pass area. Soon afterward, the Reclamation Act opened tribal land to homesteading by non-Native settlers.
About 13 miles west of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative headquarters is Diversion Dam, built by the federal government in the early 1920s and paid for with money that Congress had already appropriated to the tribes. Instead of benefiting the tribes, though, the dam and its associated canals divert water from the Big Wind River to the Midvale Irrigation District, a nearby community of non-Native ranchers and farmers. Today, the Bureau of Reclamation has cut flows until the river below the dam barely runs at all.
“They’ve been stealing Indian land and water for so long, they think it’s the right thing to do.”
Back toward the buffalo herd is Pilot Butte Power Plant, a hydropower station built by the Bureau of Reclamation to provide power to the irrigation district. Though the plant sits on tribal land, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, R, sponsored legislation in 2023 that would give the power plant and the land underneath it to the Midvale Irrigation District, arguing that it would help allay electricity costs for nontribal irrigators. Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, R, proposed a companion bill in 2023 that passed the House. Though Reclamation is legally required to consult with tribes about changes on tribal land, Martel said that neither proposal involved tribal consultation.
In March 2025, DOGE tried to close the Fish and Wildlife Service office in nearby Lander. The two-person office, one of the few that primarily serves a tribal nation, provides the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho with scientific and technical support in managing the reservation’s fish and wildlife. Over the past two decades, the office has helped the tribes restore tens of thousands of acres of sagebrush steppe, almost 2,000 acres of wetlands and 26 miles of rivers and streams.
It wasn’t the first time: The federal government had repeatedly tried and failed to close the office in the past. Once again, though, the tribes managed to keep it open. Still, Martel said, they shouldn’t have to constantly fight to maintain their relationship with the agency.
Though the federal government is bound by treaty to ensure that tribal lands benefit tribes and is legally required to act as a nation-to-nation partner with tribal governments, “most of the trust relationship we’re talking about doesn’t exist, especially now, with MAGA,” said Martel. “They’ve been stealing Indian land and water for so long, they think it’s the right thing to do.”
By October 2025, Reclamation had released so much water from Bull Lake, above the Diversion Dam, for the irrigation district, that the reservoir was dangerously low, said Richard Baldes, an Eastern Shoshone tribal member and the second Fish and Wildlife biologist serving the Wind River Reservation. The lake’s population of burbot — a native fish that is an important traditional food source for the tribes — is at all-time low because its spawning habitat, along with that of all of the forage fish the species eats to survive, has been left “high and dry.”
But despite its trust responsibility to the tribe, said Baldes, the Fish and Wildlife Service won’t speak up for the burbot fishery. No federal agency will.
“In a sense, I can’t blame the Fish and Wildlife Service — they are probably afraid to stand up and say ‘boo,’” he said, referring to the threats to federal workers from DOGE and the administration. “But that fishery is going to hell in a handbasket fast.”
So the tribes are doing what the tribes have always done when faced with injustice: They’re working on a solution of their own. The Eastern Shoshone buffalo herd is providing tribal members with food, giving people access to an animal that has guided and inspired them since time immemorial. Thanks to tribal land protections and tribally led stewardship, Martel said, much of the wildlife that depends on reservation land is thriving.
Tribal leaders are also looking ahead. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, in collaboration with tribal government officials, elders, local school leaders and others, has been holding workshops on current threats to water, air quality, wildlife and food security. At the meetings, tribal members learn how tribal resources, governance and sovereignty can be used to strengthen their families and communities. Understanding tribal authority and jurisdiction, Martel said, is the first step to regaining tribal rights, even if the federal agencies that should be supporting the tribes are too unwilling — or too scared, as Baldes said — to step up.
“We’re going to show our people how to fight back in a positive and powerful way, using the blood and spirit of our ancestors,” he said. “Hahou,” he added, directing the Arapaho expression toward his ancestors. “Thanks for that.”
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WHILE PUBLIC LANDS MAY lie at the heart of the Greater Yellowstone area, the big chunks of tribal and privately owned land keep the region’s blood flowing, said Arthur Middleton, a University of California, Berkeley professor who has spent his career studying Wyoming’s wildlife. Private lands account for about 30% of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, or about 6 million acres.
To support the region’s wildlife, the federal government needs to play as significant a role in private-land conservation as it has in the past — especially given the region’s land values, which are sky-high and rising, said Chet Work, executive director of the Gallatin Valley Land Trust.
“I feel like the private lands are more in jeopardy right now than public, at least in terms of ownership,” Work said. “These big ranches on the margins of public lands are selling for more and more each year.”
Landowners who want to keep their land together sometimes turn to land trusts, which can help them establish conservation easements that prevent future development. While some landowners donate permanent conservation easements as tax breaks, others sell them in order to pay off debts from tractors or new barns, or as an alternative to selling off all or part of the land itself.
Permanent easements — which stipulate that the land can never be subdivided — generally only pay landowners 15% of the land’s fair market value. But as land values shoot up, so does the cost of easements.
“When I started (more than 20 years ago), most easements were a quarter of a million dollars,” Work said. “And now I can’t remember when there was one less than $1 million.”
The Biden administration, spearheaded in part by Middleton during his time as a senior wildlife advisor with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, created the Migratory Big Game Initiative in 2022. The USDA program offered tens of millions of dollars in assistance to private landowners for projects like conservation easements and weed control. For more than a decade, the department has also supported private-land conservation through the Grasslands Conservation Reserve Program, which pays landowners to graze livestock in a wildlife-friendly way and to pledge not to develop their land for a set period of time.
“I feel like the private lands are more in jeopardy right now than public, at least in terms of ownership.”
These programs, like so many others, have been disrupted by the Trump administration.
Montana alone had $75 million in federal conservation easement grants canceled in 2025, Work said. One-third of that money would have supported private-land conservation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Land trusts have been able to replace some of those funds with private donations, he added, but the cancellations mean “less families we can support and keep on the ground.” Once a relatively undeveloped piece of rangeland has been sold to a developer and sliced and diced with fences and roads, its value as habitat for large migratory mammals has been lost forever.
While Congress initially authorized at least $13 per acre per year for the Grasslands Conservation Reserve Program, the new administration dropped those payments to as little as $1 per acre in many counties, said Lesli Allison, CEO of the Western Landowners Alliance.
“Landowner interest was strong, particularly in places like Wyoming, where the program helps sustain both working lands and migratory big game,” Allison said. The lower amount, however, “renders the program meaningless in those places.” The USDA is continuing to evaluate the program, and Allison hopes to see payment rates restored.
Jim Hellyer, who ranches on both private and public land in the southern Wind River Range just east of Lander, Wyoming, is halfway through a 10-year enrollment in the Grasslands Conservation Reserve Program. He said that the $13 per acre he receives barely covers the cost of implementing the grazing plan the program requires. But $1 an acre would be much worse, providing little incentive for landowners to prioritize conservation.
Over tea at a Lander, Wyoming, coffee shop in November, I asked Hellyer about his and his neighbors’ experiences with the cuts to federal offices and programs over the past year. He paused, considering the question, then said: “The only practical, on-the-ground answer I can give you is that I couldn’t get hold of (agency representatives) when I had a question.”
The changes are just making government bureaucracy even more frustrating to deal with. “Everyone is so used to it taking so long,” Hellyer said. “Now, instead of it taking four years to permit a (water) well, it will take four years and two months. I don’t think cutting staff has led to the intended efficiency.”
Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, agreed: “My experience with Stock Growers, and talking to people right now, is that if there’s a disturbing thing, it’s uncertainty.”
Large private landowners typically invest a great deal in conservation, according to a report by the Western Landowners Alliance. A 2024 survey of 649 Western landowners who owned more than 500 acres showed that they had invested a total of more than $400 million of their own money in conservation. Only 10% were enrolled in federal, state or local programs, though, citing barriers like complex paperwork, confusing enrollment and insufficient incentives.
Despite the obstacles, Work’s phone keeps ringing with calls from landowners wanting to talk about conservation easements. That makes the loss of federal funding and capacity even more galling, he said. After all, the support was bipartisan: More than 90% of respondents in Colorado College’s 2025 Conservation in the West poll favored more conservation on private land. “That is crazy,” he said, adding that more than 90% of people typically can’t even “agree it’s raining outside.”
BACK IN THE BRIDFER-TETON, the high granite peaks of the Wind River Range were glowing in the late afternoon sun when we finally neared camp, trailing grumpy llamas and famished children.
As we trudged down the final stretch, past a weatherbeaten wooden trail sign, I thought about how recreationists had, in many ways, abdicated responsibility for our public lands to the federal government. Though a small percentage of us volunteer, most of us simply show up and expect trails and campsites to be ready, stewarded by our user fees and tax dollars.
No one knows how much the federal government will be investing in the Yellowstone region five, 10 or 20 years from now. At least until the next presidential election, though, its vast and beautiful lands and waters are likely to be painfully short of both stewards and funding. Should everyone who is able start carrying handsaws into the wilderness, ready to help clear trails?
David Willms, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate vice president of public lands, said that people who recreate on public lands should start accepting more responsibility.
“That was true conservation.”
More people should “volunteer for cleanup days, or habitat improvement days, or fence-pull days, or trail maintenance days,” he said. They should also support the Friends groups and other nonprofit organizations that shoulder some of the stewardship work on public lands.
But Willms emphasized that public lands still need trained staff to make trails safe. Besides, he said, while many of us might be willing to pack an extra trash bag into the wilderness and carry out someone else’s garbage, we’re less likely to “take a shovel and trash bag and shovel up other people’s feces and pack it out.”
People have tended the land within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for thousands of years, said Wes Martel, beginning with the Sheep Eater people, who lived year-round at 13,000 feet in the Wind River Range. “That was true conservation,” he said: “You take care of us, we take care of you.”
And over the last 40 years, the general public’s commitment to conserving the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has grown, said Bob Keiter, a University of Utah law professor and author of a book about the region.
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The Trump administration has done and may still do plenty of damage to public lands in general, and the Yellowstone ecosystem in particular, he said, not only through layoffs and funding cuts but also the proposed rescission of the BLM’s 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule and the Forest Service’s 2001 Roadless Rule, along with the continued implementation of Project 2025. But after spending decades studying the history and resilience of the Yellowstone region and its people, Keiter thinks the public’s support for public lands will ultimately prevail.
Last year, congressional proposals that would have permitted the sale of millions of acres of public land failed in the face of bipartisan public pushback. This year’s Conservation in the West poll, released by Colorado College in February, showed that 86% of voters in eight Western states, including 75% of MAGA supporters, were worried about cuts to public-land agencies, while 76% of respondents — the highest in the poll’s history — want their members of Congress to “place more emphasis on conservation and recreation” over “maximizing energy production.”
Maybe, after a year of the Trump administration’s persistent attacks on public lands, the public will say enough is enough. Maybe it already has, said Jacob Malcom, former director of the Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis and executive director of Next Interior, a group he founded to help the department navigate a post-Trump future.
“I have a feeling this is an opportunity,” Malcom said. “Let’s go through reconstruction … go through what works well and what doesn’t, and reconstruct what will work well.”
So maybe the news from the Yellowstone region over the past year isn’t like an obituary. Maybe it’s more like a series of distress signals, punctuated by stories of researchers and managers scraping by, tribes finding their own solutions, volunteers and donors stepping up, and the public standing up for federal workers and the public lands.
Last August, as we perched on our camp chairs to eat dinner, I thought about the chaos unfolding around our bone-tired group in a landscape we all loved so deeply. The danger, in the years to come, is that the public will tire of the bad news and the uncertainty around public lands — that with fewer people studying and managing the West’s landscapes, problems will go unrecognized, and that we won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.
Maybe, I worry, that’s the point.
HCN Correspondent Jonathan Thompson researched and reported the graphic facts and figures in this story.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the April 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Defunding the Greater Yellowstone.”
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