An upside-down American flag is meant as "a signal of dire distress"—and that's exactly what visitors found at California's Yosemite National Park over the weekend. It seems staffers upset about the Trump administration taking a hatchet to the federal workforce draped a giant flag from the top of El Capitan, right near where its famous annual "firefall" event takes place, reports NBC News (the outlet's LA affiliate has video). "The purpose of this exercise of free speech is to disrupt without violence and draw attention to the fact that public lands in the United States are under attack," a statement from the group of six protesters said of the 30-by-50 banner, per the San Francisco Chronicle.
They added: "Firing 1,000s of staff regardless of position or performance across the nation is the first step in destabilizing the protections in place for these great places." Gavin Carpenter, a disabled war vet and maintenance mechanic for Yosemite who donated the flag and helped put it up on Saturday, notes, "We're bringing attention to what's happening to the parks, which are every American's properties. ... We're losing people here, and it's not sustainable if we want to keep the parks open."
The park lost nearly a dozen of its full-time staffers in a Feb. 14 termination email—and because Yosemite employees usually live in employer-provided housing, many are now scrambling to figure out where they're going to live as well. About 1,000 jobs in the National Park Service have been slashed overall so far by the Trump administration, a move that those who work in the parks say will lead to less-sanitary facilities, longer queues, and more dangerous hiking and camping conditions, per NBC.
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"Firing these employees puts the park's resources at risk and also leaves visitors vulnerable as there will be no one to answer their calls for help," photographer Brittany Colt said in the caption to a photo she posted of the flag on her Instagram. "These jobs are extremely important for the safety of visitors and for future generations." It's not the first time that El Capitan has been transformed into a DIY protest site. Last June, a group of climbers there unfurled a banner that read "Stop the Genocide," referring to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza (More Yosemite National Park stories.)
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