A fourth-year landscape architecture student at the University of Arkansas is asking residents and business owners in Estes Park to participate in a survey examining the impacts of the October 2025 federal government shutdown on three national park gateway communities.
Dean Zakrzewski is conducting a comparative case study as part of his undergraduate capstone project, focusing on how the shutdown affected workers, businesses, and community well-being in Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park; Bar Harbor, Maine, the gateway to Acadia National Park; and Moab, Utah, the gateway to both Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park.
The research seeks to move beyond traditional economic metrics to better understand the personal and community-level consequences of prolonged federal closures.
The survey explores a wide range of impacts, including emotional stress, financial strain, and residents’ confidence in their community’s resilience. Zakrzewski plans to close the survey March 20 to analyze the data ahead of his capstone defense later this spring.
“These communities were selected for several reasons,” Zakrzewski said. “They are similar in size, which helps when collecting survey-based data, but they also support very different types of national parks and tourism economies.”
While Estes Park serves visitors to the high elevations of the Rocky Mountains, Bar Harbor supports tourism tied to coastal and marine environments, and Moab functions as a gateway to desert landscapes and off-road recreation. That variation, Zakrzewski said, allows the research to capture how different types of businesses—from whale-watching tours and outdoor guiding services to 4×4 rental operations—may experience federal disruptions in distinct ways.
Limiting the study to three communities also helps keep the project manageable while still allowing for enough diversity in responses to identify meaningful patterns.
Zakrzewski said his motivation for the research stems from gaps in existing studies on gateway communities. Much of the available literature, he noted, focuses narrowly on economic losses and often examines only a single town at a time.
“Most research takes a very bird’s-eye view,” he said. “It tends to overlook individual experiences and paints entire communities with broad brushstrokes.”
By gathering firsthand accounts from residents and business owners across multiple gateway towns, Zakrzewski hopes to show that the human impacts of government shutdowns are more complex—and more personal—than existing data suggests.
Residents and business owners interested in participating in the survey are encouraged to share their experiences to help ensure Estes Park’s perspective is represented in the study. Click here to participate and share your ideas.
Zakrzewski plans to share the results and analysis with the Estes Valley community later this spring.
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