As the sun rose over the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park, Linda Carney bent over a toilet, windshield scraper in hand.

“It’s the plumber’s daughter in me,” she joked, having used the scraper to remove frozen human waste from the side of the toilet.

Carney was one of about 10 Gardiner community members who decided to take matters into their own hands and clean up rest stops and remove garbage from Yellowstone on Saturday, two weeks into the partial federal government shutdown. National parks across the country have been left with no one to care for facilities despite many still being open to visitors.

Mike Skelton, owner of Yellowstone Wonders, a company that offers tours of the park, said he and others noticed trash was starting to pile up while doing tours recently. So he and a few other Gardiner and Emigrant residents gathered a group to hit the northern part of the park, between Gardiner and the Pebble Creek area in the northeastern part of the park.

“We’re locals and we love this park, so we don’t want it to look like trash,” Gardiner resident Paula Rainbolt said.

Volunteers cleaned rest areas from Tower Junction to Pebble Creek. They were set to go from Tower Junction to Gardiner on Sunday, eating pizza courtesy of K-Bar Pizza afterward. Conoco also donated gas cards to volunteers, and Yellowstone Forever donated some garbage bags. Many volunteers also paid for supplies out of pocket.

Trash around Yellowstone hadn’t piled up as much as they expected, volunteers said, though many bathrooms weren’t a pretty sight. One bathroom at the Hitching Post stop had human excrement all over the floor and a broken toilet seat. The other had puke and blood splattered all over the toilet and floor.

Despite the unpleasant nature of the work, Kelly Kirk said volunteers were happy to do it.

“People’s livelihoods depend on this — we’re all tied to the park,” she said. “And any excuse to get into the park, right?”

Volunteers brushed snow off entrances, cleaned toilets, replaced toilet paper and switched out garbage bags, and they’ll likely do it again most weekends, if the shutdown continues.

“I don’t know what happens if the (outhouses) fill up,” she said.

Inspired by Montana’s culture of outdoor recreation, a popular hunting show is moving its headquarters to Bozeman.

“MeatEater,” currently in its seventh season, follows its host Steven Rinella as he hunts, fishes and cooks game around the world. It’s also part of an outdoor media company that regularly posts recipes and articles about conservation to its website.

The show has filmed several times in Montana and hosts plan on shooting more episodes in the state, after receiving a $40,000 film grant from the Montana Department of Commerce to feature Montana locations in the video series. It will be the first Netflix series shot in Montana with support from the Big Sky Film Grant. Montana-based investment firm Next Frontier Capital has also invested in the show.

“We’ve filmed from South America to Alaska,” Rinella said. “It’s always been a goal of mine to get back here, especially after having kids.”

Rinella has been hunting since he was a kid and would trap muskrats with his friends to sell them for their hides. He previously lived in Montana for about 10 years, after getting his master of fine arts in creative nonfiction from the University in Montana.

He has written for Outside magazine and a few other publications.

The show originally started in 2012 with four staff members, but it has grown to 18 employees, and Rinella said it plans to hire more from within and outside Bozeman. There was a consensus among employees that Bozeman was the right place to base operations, he said, with a university to draw from and plenty of amenities to make people want to make the town their home.

The show and its media company offer content contributor, editorial, leadership and production positions. It has already hired Kevin Sloan as its CEO, the former president of Sitka hunting gear.

There wasn’t really a second choice for relocation after Bozeman, which offers a well-connected airport, quality workforce and a culture of outdoor recreation. Not to mention, Montana’s known for its public land.

“There’s literally no other place I’d rather live, nor a more authentic home for ‘MeatEater,’” Rinella said in a press release.