Popular Arches hike set to reopen after staff shortages prompted temporary closure
Apr 11, 2025, 5:30 PM
Fiery Furnace at Arches National Park is pictured in 2019. Self-guided hikes will resume on Tuesday after the hike was closed on March 23, according to park officials. (Devon Dewey, KSL.com)
(Devon Dewey, KSL.com)
MOAB — A strenuous but popular hike at Arches National Park will soon be available again after it was temporarily closed due to staffing shortages.
Self-guided Fiery Furnace hikes will resume on Tuesday for hikers with a permit, while daily ranger-guided tours will resume on May 4, according to the park’s website.
The update comes after park officials announced on March 23 that the area would be closed off indefinitely because they didn’t have enough staff to allow for self-guided or ranger-led tours.
Karen Hanker, the park’s spokeswoman, told Backpacker the park had a “limited team” at the time, which was devoted to staffing the front desk, visitor services and other guided tours. She also told the Times-Independent the issues would likely be resolved once seasonal employees were hired, adding that the difficulties of the hike also factored into the decision to temporarily close the trail.
“There’s also the search-and-rescue component,” she told the Moab newspaper. “Should something happen to someone in the Fiery Furnace, we would need to provide support. Rescues are incredibly staff-intensive anywhere in the park, let alone a place as geologically complex as the Fiery Furnace.”
Fiery Furnace is described by the park as a “natural labyrinth of narrow passages between towering sandstone walls.” But given its “challenging” terrain, rangers require hikers to either be guided or obtain a $16 permit, along with some other guidelines. Children under the age of 5 aren’t allowed, while an adult must accompany any children 12 or younger.
It isn’t clear if the staff shortages that led to the trail’s closure were tied to mass layoffs at the National Park Service. About 1,000 National Park Service employees across the country were let go in February after President Donald Trump ordered major reductions to the nation’s government workforce.
Arches has been busy regardless of its staff size. A flood of visitors arrived at the park on March 29, forcing the rangers to temporarily close off entry to the park, nearly a week after the Fiery Furnace closure and days before its timed-entry program resumed. The park attracted more than 1.4 million visitors in 2024.
Meanwhile, Park Service officials told KSL-TV in early March that Arches planned to hire seasonal workers to help with the demand at national parks. More than 11.1 million people visited Utah’s “Mighty 5” national parks last year.
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