Billings Gazette

Gardiner volunteers clean restrooms, take out trash in Yellowstone

BOZEMAN — As the sun rose over the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park, Linda Carney bent over a toilet, windshield scraper in hand.

“It’s the plumber’s daughter in me,” she joked, having used the scraper to remove frozen human waste from the side of the toilet.

Carney was one of about 10 Gardiner community members who decided to take matters into their own hands and clean up rest stops and remove garbage from Yellowstone Saturday morning, two weeks into the partial federal government shutdown. National parks across the country have been left with no one to care for facilities despite many still being open to visitors.

Mike Skelton, owner of Yellowstone Wonders, a company that offers tours of the park, said he and others noticed trash was starting to pile up while doing tours recently. So he and a few other Gardiner

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