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Because of the shutdown, the park was “hanging by a thread,” said Ken Yager, 59, a professional climber who came to Yosemite more than four decades ago and never left the area.

All but a skeleton crew of rangers at the park were furloughed, the visitor center was closed and no one answered the phone at the park headquarters. Nearby, the towns that rely on Yosemite tourism for their livelihoods were hurting. Mr. Yager, who runs a cleaning service, laid off most of his employees.

Every day the shutdown stretched on, Mr. Yager said, people were “more and more desperate.”

It has been more than six weeks since the blustery Oval Office confrontation on Dec. 11 between Mr. Trump and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader.

Mr. Trump, reiterating his campaign pledge to build a border wall, had said he would take the blame for shutting down the government if Democrats rebuffed his effort. “I will take the mantle,” he said in a vow that was replayed on cable news countless times. “I will be the one to shut it down.”

And it did shut down, in the early morning of Dec. 22. The shuttered departments included Treasury, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Interior, State, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Commerce and Justice. More than 420,000 federal employees began to work without pay; another 380,000 were furloughed to wait for a resolution from home.

Yet the notion of a government shutdown still felt to many like a familiar political ritual rather than a fear-inducing event, at least at first. This shutdown marked at least the 21st time in the last four decades that the government has not passed some form of a spending bill on time.

In the first days and weeks, a tangle of complications began to emerge.

Sheila Bailey, 73, had set her retirement for Dec. 31, after working for 34 years as a scientist at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. And indeed, the date came and went, and Ms. Bailey is spending her days at home.