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Unless Congress can reach a budget agreement by March 1, the country’s national parks will be hit by a $110 million budget cut, resulting in shuttered campgrounds, shorter seasons, road closings and reduced emergency services, a parks advocacy group reports.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park will close four campgrounds. The Grand Canyon National Park will shorten visitor center hours at the South Rim. Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts will close its visitors center and restrict access to large sections of the Great Beach. And Yosemite and Yellowstone will delay summer road openings up to four weeks, according to the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, which said it obtained the details from sources in the park service.

Jeffrey Olson, a National Park Service spokesman, confirmed that the information in the coalition’s statement was accurate. “We hope it doesn’t come to pass,” he said.

The park service itself has warned that the public should be prepared for reduced hours and services, including the “closing of camping, hiking and other recreational areas when there is insufficient staff to ensure the protection of visitors, employees, and historic, cultural and natural resources.”



Park advocates like the coalition of former employees are urging Congress to prevent the cuts, which it estimates would slice 5 percent from the park service’s $2.2 billion budget.

Joan Anzelmo, a spokeswoman for the retirees group, pointed out that America’s 398 national parks and monuments attract 280 million visitors a year, and that consumer spending at the parks supports 247,000 jobs and yields a $31 billion economic impact. “Congress should be strategic, and if you’re going to be strategic, you don’t cut the revenue generators,” she said.

Beyond providing revenue, she said, visitors “have a deep, emotional connection to the parks. They’re our heritage. But if we relied on today’s Congress, there would be no Yellowstone, there would be no Grand Canyon, because they can’t put aside their partisan differences to get their job done.”

Any entity that receives federal money, like school districts and military bases, is subject to the automatic federal budget cuts known as sequestration. The former park employees say that the effects would be severe because the cuts would be made over the seven remaining months of the 2013 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

Chuck Neal, a retired ecologist with the Department of the Interior, which oversees the park service, said he worried that reduced staffing at the parks could “open opportunities for local, hooligan-types to create some mischief, such as poaching and harassing wildlife.”

More broadly, conservationists see the looming cuts as part of a worrisome trend that undervalues natural resources like parks. “That trend has been in the works for some time, starting with Reagan,” Mr. Neal said. In his view, President Obama has not reversed it.

State and local officials also worry about the impact on their economies. Tourism is the “No. 2 industry in Wyoming, and Yellowstone is a big part of that,” said Renny MacKay, a spokesman for Gov. Matt Mead of Wyoming.

Rick Howe, director of visitor services at the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce, said that businesses in communities adjacent to Yellowstone were working with the state on contingency plans. He declined to offer specifics on whether, for example, state money could be used to plow park roads so that they opened on schedule.

Ms. Anzelmo said the coalition released the details of how the cuts would affect the parks to alert the public and to send a message to Congress. “This is America. Come on, run the country,” she said.