OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. – Six international students and their host learned an interesting lesson about American politics recently when then attempted to visit Olympic National Park in Washington.

Port Angeles middle school teacher Kelly Sanders took the visiting college students – who are from Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan and China – out to Olympic National Park for a hike to Marymere Falls over the weekend, but they never made it out of the parking lot, the Peninsula Daily News reports.

Sanders was taking a picture of the students at the park’s ranger station off U.S. Highway 131 when Park Ranger Jennifer Jackson intervened and issued Sanders a $125 ticket for “Violation of Closure (Government Shutdown),” the news site reports.

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“I didn’t know how to explain it to (the students) because I can’t really understand why all this happened myself,” Sanders told the Daily News. “I know they were surprised that we would get a ticket for trying to go for a hike.”

Drivers of two other cars in the parking lot at the time also received tickets, including Leanne Potts of Sequim, who was at the park for a hike with a friend. The Daily News reports all of the drivers passed a sign while entering the park that read “Because of the federal government shutdown, this National Park Service facility is closed.”

Both Sanders and Potts said they didn’t take the sign to mean entrance to the park was prohibited, especially since the sign and cones at the gate were spaced wide enough to permit traffic.

“When I think facilities, I think buildings or bathrooms or features or something,” Potts told the Daily News. “I don’t think of a forest.”

Sanders said she “just assumed that it meant the bathrooms were closed, not that I would be breaking the law.”

We have to wonder what kind of message the students from other countries took away from the experience. The federal government clearly appears to be punishing citizens for a financial crisis created by bureaucrats in Washington D.C.

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It certainly wouldn’t cost the government a dime to allow citizens to walk the park’s trails, so any reasonable person would conclude that the tickets, and the closing of the park, are more about politics than anything else.

Park ranger Jennifer Jackson told the group she is working without pay during the shutdown, and encouraged all of those ticketed to complain about closure, the Daily News reports.

Sanders told the Daily News she has “hosted a lot of international students for (Peninsula College),” and she tries her best to “give them experiences they wouldn’t normally get.”

We suspect this hard lesson in government bureaucracy and petty politics isn’t what she had in mind.

Regardless, both Sanders and Potts plan to fight their tickets in federal court, according to the news site.