Two weeks into the government shutdown – which has left trash piling up in national parks – Marc Newland’s daughter Erica had an idea.

After hearing about the government shutdown, she decided that instead of spending their first daddy-daughter day in a while hiking, the pair should pick up the trash that has been steadily accumulating in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

"That’s something we’ve done in the past, we’ve done a lot of clean-up things," he said. "But it’s not every day that we put our backpacks down and grab the trash bags and trash grabbers instead."

"There's a lot of litter around and it's bad for the world, so I decided to clean up the parks," Erica, 10, explained.

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Unlike previous federal shutdowns, the national parks have not technically closed, yet are not being staffed by park employees. Trash is building up, toilets are clogging, and at least three people have died in national park accidents amid the shutdown.

At the Great Smoky Mountains, emergency funding ended after the park's three visitors centers closed at 4:30 p.m. on New Year's Day. Now the park is operating under the Department of Interior's contingency plan for the National Parks Service.

Newland and his daughter, both avid hikers, got to work on Thursday at the Little River and Jake's Creek trailheads. Initially, there wasn't much to do, but when they got to the Laurel Falls trailhead, they found plenty of trash. Newland dubbed them the “Government Shutdown 'Litter Patrol,'" in a post on a popular Facebook group for hikers.

While trash has certainly become a greater problem during the shutdown, Newland emphasized that "the litter problem is always a problem."

In Newland's post, the pair asked for others to pitch in, too.

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“Erica says that she would like to challenge other hikers to take one day off from getting in miles and impressive vista pics and instead, give back by grabbing a trash bag, heading to the park and collecting some litter,” his post read. “These mountains give so much to so many people. Imagine if only a fraction of those people decided to give back to the mountains.”

They returned to the park twice over the weekend to help clean up and saw several others had accepted their cleaning challenge, Newland said. Although they have to get back to work and school, he said they plan to work with local humanitarian groups in the coming weeks to help clean up a stretch of highway connected to the park that is looking "really, really bad."

"We’re just really shocked at the amount of response that we’ve gotten from everywhere," he said. "This is about us our loving our Earth and loving our national parks."

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Contributing: Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY and Tyler Whetstone, Knoxville News Sentinel

Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg