ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, Colo. — The visitors’ centers at Rocky Mountain National Park were locked and dark on Saturday. Drivers breezed through gates without stopping at tollbooths to pay the park’s $25 entrance fee. And as adventurers switchbacked up the snowy roads toward the park’s sledding hills and backcountry ski terrain, they encountered a new sign: “ROAD CLOSED.”

So began the opening hours of the latest shutdown for a federal government that has become familiar with furloughs, and a country that has almost come to shrug off stalemates and spending fights — at least at first.

“It’s an annoyance, but you can work around it,” said Desmond Hadlum, who drove in with his wife, Ann, to go snowshoeing. They stopped a park ranger at the entrance gate to ask about the shutdown.

“So far, so good,” the ranger replied.

But the shutdown’s effects — especially visible on Saturday at closed or unstaffed National Park Service sites, and at checkpoints at airports and the nation’s borders as officers stood guard without pay — will be magnified once the standoff seeps past Christmas, when federal offices would ordinarily be open and staffed with the approximately 380,000 employees who have been told to stay home while President Trump and Congress try to reach a spending accord.