Why Is an Upside-Down Flag Flying at Yosemite? What Does it Mean?

There are few things more quintessentially American than Yosemite National Park, which is why so many people were alarmed by the news that there's currently a flag flying upside-down inside the park.

Following the news of the upside-down flag, many wanted to know what it meant and why people inside Yosemite decided to fly it.

National parks are one of America's defining features. Here's what we know about what exactly is going on at Yosemite.

Upside-down flags are generally hung as a sign of distress. Although upside-down flags used to be a literal signal to allies that the people there were in distress, more recently it's also become a symbol of a nation in distress. Some who incorrectly believed that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election hung upside-down flags to symbolize their protest, and their feeling that America was no longer a functioning country.

Now, employees at Yosemite have hung an upside-down flag off of El Capitan, one of the park's defining landmarks, to protest the downsizing that the Trump administration has done across the government, and specifically at national parks. The administration has cut the number of staff working at each park, reducing the availability of staff and thereby making access to the parks more difficult.

“We’re bringing attention to what’s happening to the parks, which are every American’s properties," Gavin Carpenter, a maintenance mechanic who works at Yosemite, told The San Francisco Chronicle. "It’s super important we take care of them, and we’re losing people here, and it’s not sustainable if we want to keep the parks open.”

The National Parks are just one of the more visible examples of the way Trump's federal rollbacks have impacted the services offered by the government. Park workers were among the 2,200 employees fired at the Interior Department, many of which only found out that they had been fired when they were locked out of their emails. This kind of mass firing leaves thousands of workers without jobs, and also makes federal services worse in the short term.

While Trump and Elon Musk have claimed that these moves are designed to cut costs inside the government, it's unclear whether they will actually have that effect.

These changes have been highly disruptive to the functioning of the federal government, though, and it doesn't seem as if the Trump administration has careful plans as to how they will operate now.

In the meantime, services at national parks seem likely to get worse, and more people are likely going to be overworked as they attempt to pick up the slack left behind by their fired colleagues. It may save taxpayers some marginal amount of money, but it's unclear whether, in the long run, those who pay taxes will be grateful to have the money back.