Despite consistent visitation in recent years and record-breaking visitor spending, critical South Dakota tourist attractions remain subject to broader concerns as the peak tourist season begins.
The most common challenge is finding adequate workforce. A panel discussion featured in an upcoming episode of SDPBs South Dakota Focus brought current and former leaders of three major west river attractions together to discuss the workforce needed to handle the busiest months for visitors.
Sarah Hustead is the fourth-generation leader and Vice President of Wall Drug, which began with her great-grandparents in 1931. Famous for its free ice-water, fresh donuts and ubiquitous roadside signage, Wall Drug boasts more than 2 million visitors a year. The surrounding community of Wall, S.D., is home to about 800 residents.
According to Hustead, Wall Drug has about 70 year-round employees and must hire roughly 120 additional workers to manage the influx of visitors during the peak summer months.
American college students used to make up the vast majority of those seasonal workers. Hustead said that changed gradually over the past couple decades.
As internships became more important, we saw less and less college students applying, she explained.
Today, some of the seasonal workforce at Wall Drug is made up of local high schoolers and traveling work campers, like those featured in the Academy Award-winning 2020 film Nomadland. But many seasonal workers come to Wall Drug through the H-2B work visa process. That program is set aside for foreign nationals to fill temporary, non-agricultural positions.
We really count on those workers, said Hustead. Since its a lottery system, its kind of luck of the draw. It seems like were having more trouble after theyve been approved. To get those visas at the embassies just everything is taking a little bit longer.
Because the H-2B visa process can be lengthy, Wall Drug begins the process of applying for seasonal workers in October. By January, Hustead typically learns the businesss standing in the visa lottery system and how soon those workers will arrive for the busy summer months.
We also use the J-1 visa program, which is for students, said Hustead. That program is much easier and has been going really well for us.
The visa programs have made Wall a temporary home for workers from Thailand, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Jamaica and more.
South Dakotas federally-managed lands, like Badlands National Park just south of Wall, also need additional seasonal workers.
Mike Pflaum formerly served as superintendent of Badlands National Park, and hes now a special advisor for the non-profit Badlands National Park Conservancy.
Every year we would hire as many seasonal employees as the budget allowed, said Pflaum, to do everything from fee collection to emergency services to operating the visitor center desk to doing visitor programs and maintaining facilities and much more. So in many cases, it was the seasonal employees who would be the face of the park.
Dan Wenk agrees. He spent a portion of his own forty-year career with the National Parks Service as superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Wenk is now on the Board of Directors for the Mount Rushmore Society, the nonprofit organization that partners with the NPS to preserve and enhance the memorial and surrounding exhibits.
We relied on people who would come back year after year, Wenk said of seasonal workers. They would know the park. They would know the stories. They would know the educational side of what they were going to do, and theyd also understand what they needed to do and how they were going to contribute to the efficiency and the things that people have come to experience and to love about national parks.
Like Wall Drug, federally-controlled attractions like Badlands National Park and Mt. Rushmore start their seasonal hiring process several months in advance.
When the Trump administration instituted a hiring freeze for the National Parks Service followed by the sudden layoffs of 1,000 probationary NPS employees in mid-February, that process was interrupted.
Shortly after the initial layoffs, the Trump administration permitted NPS to fill up to 7,700 seasonal positions nationwide.
I think what we know now is that we will have a seasonal workforce, said Wenk in late April. What we dont know is how thats going to translate into the visitor season, because many of the seasonal employees were those longtime seasonal employees who came back year after year. When the uncertainty arose in terms of if they had a job and would it last, many very highly qualified people decided to do something else.
Both Pflaum and Wenk worked in various positions with the National Parks Service across the country in their careers, and both chose to retire in South Dakota to continue promoting and preserving the lands they came to love.
Wenk suspects theyre far from the only ones.
I think we do have in South Dakota more and more amenity migrants people who are coming from other places to come to South Dakota because of the amenities that we have, he said.
And the public lands are part of that.
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