When someone breaks an ankle in The Narrows or gets heat exhaustion on Angel's Landing, one of Zion National Park's search and rescue teams comes to their aid.
But the increasingly large crowds flocking to the southwest Utah park threaten to strain the workforce charged with keeping its visitors safe.
The park had 193 search and rescue incidents in 2024, spokesperson Matthew Fink said, mostly concentrated between Memorial Day and Labor Day. During that peak season, it's not uncommon for Zion to field multiple complex emergency calls in a single day. That can take a toll on the rescuers.
"We have to work with the resources that we have, because this is a no-fail mission," Fink said. "So, we have enough staff to respond to incidents. It's just the concern that comes up is burnout."
Zion's yearly visitation has nearly doubled since 2010, but the park's total number of employees has gone down. President Donald Trump's ongoing federal hiring freeze — paired with ranger job cuts and buyouts earlier this year — hasn't helped the situation, leaving many parks even more understaffed than normal.
While Zion has become a year-round destination, Memorial Day elevates its tourist traffic to another level. For the past four years, June has been the park's most visited month. It welcomed 613,552 visitors in June of 2024. That's more people than the combined populations of Salt Lake City, Provo, St. George, Ogden and Sandy — in a single month.
"Search and rescue is always at the top of our mind, no matter what the season," Fink said. "But we are definitely — with the increase in visitation — focusing on visitor safety."
The search and rescue teams tasked with protecting the park's millions of annual visitors come from a pool of 198 people, Fink said. They include interpretive rangers and maintenance staff who may not have emergency operations in their usual job descriptions and paid volunteers from the community, such as local guides. For each incident, the park's dispatch unit sends out a mass text to see who can answer the call.
But the park's usual processes for assembling its search and rescue personnel were temporarily disrupted earlier this year.
Some permanent staff members were fired in February, although many returned to work weeks later after being offered their old jobs again. A federal hiring pause on seasonal workers delayed bringing on temporary staff. That pause has since been lifted, and Fink said Zion has now reached seasonal staffing levels comparable to previous years. Around that same time, Zion wasn't sure it would be able to compensate the private guides it usually enlists for extra help. That has also been sorted out, Fink said, and the park can now pay them.
Despite some of the staffing issues getting resolved, park advocacy groups have continued to express concerns about how the federal government's actions could harm both the visitor experience and the parks themselves.
Nationwide, the park service workforce is down around 2,500 permanent employees since the start of 2025, said Association of National Park Rangers Executive Director Bill Wade. Some of them may have taken buyouts or retired from jobs — like law enforcement and emergency response — that were otherwise exempt from federal job cuts.
Because a federal hiring freeze for permanent workers is still in place, Wade said parks can't fill those vacancies.
"The lack of permanent staff all the way around is likely to have some impact on emergency response capability for things like search and rescue," he said.
He's glad to see parks following through with hiring temporary workers for the summer. His big concern, however, is what happens later this year when those seasonals leave.
"Visitors are going to see things that might be what they consider to be normal for the rest of the summer," Wade said. "That probably is going to end up being somewhat misleading in terms of what's really happening to the National Park Service."
Even though national parks set a new record with 331.9 million visitors nationwide in 2024, the parks face funding challenges. The Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget calls for cutting around $1.2 billion dollars from the National Park Service — almost 40% of the agency's total budget.
Nearly all of the entrance fees paid by Zion's visitors cover the cost of operating the park shuttle buses and paying permanent staff, said Zion Forever Project Director of Development Tiffany Stouffer. So, the money that powers search and rescue operations — and just about everything else — needs to come from another pot.
"Federal budgets just don't necessarily have the ability to take some of those costs, and so that's why we exist," Stouffer said.
The nonprofit has partnered with Zion for decades to raise money to cover those needs. In 2023, Zion Forever Project gathered donations to buy a snowmobile to help park staff conduct rescues during the winter. The group has also used donations to provide mental health support and training on swift water rescue techniques for park staff.
The big request this year is an ambulance with a price tag over $380,000. Zion currently has one ambulance, Stouffer said, and it's an older model that requires a lot of repairs. A new one would better handle the park's rough terrain and be safer for the rangers who ride in it.
"With the frequency of calls and making sure that we provide that exemplary experience for those visitors, purchasing a new ambulance is kind of key at this point," Stouffer said.
Emergency calls at Zion increased by 34% in the past year, according to Zion Forever's website.
As the busy season ramps up, Fink said the best thing visitors can do is prevent a rescue call entirely.
Before heading out into Zion, he suggested people research their hike's length and difficulty, check weather conditions and ask a ranger any questions they have. Once out on the trail, be sure to stay away from ledges and drink plenty of water.
"Our search and rescue team is here for you, and if anything does happen we will, of course, make every effort to help," Fink said. "But don't rely on us to save you, because anything can happen."
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