A year ago this month, Petrified Forest National Park locked its gates and did not open them for 43 days. Most national parks stayed open to traffic during the federal shutdown that began Oct. 1, 2025, their visitor centers dark and their rangers sent home but their roads still drivable. Petrified Forest closed completely.
The reason is particular to this park. Its gates close every night, because that is how it keeps one of the world’s richest deposits of petrified wood from leaving in the back of a car. Park Service guidance during the shutdown held that anything locked during non-business hours should stay locked for the duration of a funding lapse, so the gates stayed shut and the agency confirmed at the time that there were no visitor services, amenities or staff on site.
A shutdown costs most gateway towns their park’s services. It cost Holbrook the park itself. What it did not cost, according to the city’s own records, was revenue.
Holbrook’s tax collections rose in the year of the closure, climbing from $5.47 million in 2024 to $5.69 million in 2025 and $6.56 million in 2026, according to city tax records. Lodging tax collections, the line most exposed to a park closure, posted their two strongest years in the series, rising from $228,705 in 2024 to $303,885 and then to $379,644.
Part of that lodging gain reflects a rate change rather than more visitors. The City Council approved an ordinance on Oct. 22, 2025, three weeks into the closure and with the park still shut, doubling the city’s hotel levies effective Jan. 1, 2026.
The regional picture looks much the same. Hotel demand across Navajo County fell 5.6% in the quarter that contained the shutdown, to 162,095 room nights, with occupancy down 5.3% and average daily rates essentially flat, according to Arizona Office of Tourism figures. Statewide, lodging sales fell 1.4% in October and 0.7% in November, a dip rather than a collapse.
That does not make the park economically small. Visitors spent $38.4 million in the communities around it in 2023 and supported 451 local jobs, by the Park Service’s own accounting, in a county with roughly 20,500 jobs and a poverty rate of 22.7%. Travel accounts for 15.1% of Navajo County’s transaction privilege tax collections, or $14.4 million out of $95.3 million.
National accounts of Park Service data have described a sharp drop in visitation at Petrified Forest last year, steeper than the county’s lodging and tax records would suggest. How the park counts its visitors and whether those methods or the equipment behind them changed, was not answered in records requests made by The Tribune.
One explanation for the park’s year, at least, can be set aside. A review of Interior Department staffing records covering the 2025 and 2026 fiscal years shows that Petrified Forest’s permanent workforce held steady, staying within half a percentage point of its share of the national park system’s permanent staff and ranking 54th among 187 park units measured. Its seasonal ranks grew over the same period.
That runs against the national picture, in which the Park Service has shed roughly a quarter of its permanent workforce since January 2025 through firings, early retirements and the federal deferred resignation program. The same records show where those reductions landed.
The Washington Support Office, the agency’s headquarters, which houses budget, hiring and contracting staff along with the specialists in archaeology and planning that individual parks draw on, lost 41% of its share of the permanent workforce. All seven regional offices fell by double digits, including Intermountain, which supports Petrified Forest, down 17%. The U.S. Park Police grew its share by 55%.
Parks the size of Petrified Forest do not employ their own contracting officers or human resources staff and instead borrow them from those offices. The Interior Department has not published an explanation of how it compiles its quarterly staffing counts and the records do not show whether some positions were eliminated or simply moved in a reorganization the department announced this year.
The administration’s 2027 budget proposal would cut park operations by $736 million, more than 25%. A separate proposal to hand some park units to state governments does not reach Petrified Forest, which carries the full national park designation that the administration has said will be excluded.
The risk to Holbrook was never that the park would change hands. It is how many days a year the gates open.
