Delicate desert ecosystems in Death Valley have been damaged by off-roaders, another dismaying impact of the US government shutdown on national parks. “People come here to this pristine desert landscape,” said Laura Cunningham, who heads Western Watersheds Project, a not-for-profit conservation organization. She and her husband, a retired Death Valley park ranger, live close to the park and headed out to the desert last week to assess new damage. “There are so few places where we have a beautiful natural vista. And now people are off-roading on it.”

Cunningham and her husband took photos of what they saw: tire marks etched into delicate playas and plains that can take centuries to recover. She said there was evidence that several vehicles had careened through the colorful badlands and through the hills where animals – foxes, kangaroo rats and an assortment of lizards – burrow underground. “They can be killed when you just drive over the ground,” she said. “We are worried about the more remote places where people are driving off into this very sensitive playa.”

On Friday, Donald Trump announced that he had agreed to a deal that would reopen the government for three weeks. Damage to cherished landscapes across the country has made headlines throughout the month the government has been partially shuttered, with reports of cut-down Joshua trees, overflowing trash bins and visitor negligence, that officials say could have long-lasting effects. In Joshua Tree organizers have planned a protest demonstration for Saturday, saying they will rally even though the president has promised an end to the shutdown.

National Geographic reported that parks lost roughly $400,000 a day in entrance fees and now more funds will be needed to make repairs. “Some [efforts] will take weeks or months. Some will last generations. Some may not be able to be fixed,” the former National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis told the publication in early January.

Death Valley is one of America’s largest parks, which makes it difficult to oversee even when park officials aren’t furloughed. The park service calls it an “outdoor natural history museum” with “examples of most of the earth’s geological eras and the forces that expose them”. Some rocks have been found to contain 400m-year-old fossils, and they can be easily crushed.