Your Sleeping Bear Dunes experience this year may feel very different — thanks to Trump’s and Musk’s wrecking ball
UPDATE (March 12): The National Park Service once again has the green light to hire seasonal workers, but the late start has hampered the ability of Sleeping Bear Dunes to populate its seasonal roster. As of Glen Arbor Sun press time, approximately 80 percent of the National Lakeshore’s more than 100 seasonal positions remained vacant. The federal government chaos and the inability of seasonals from outside the area to find housing has prompted a slew of declines from candidates who were suddenly called and offered seasonal positions in March. Sleeping Bear Dunes staff have been paralyzed in other ways, too. Government-issued credit cards used by Park staff are frozen. They can’t buy ammunition or ranger supplies; they can’t even buy toilet paper for outhouses at hiking trails.
Devoted National Park employees share their stories of being terminated, and preview what services may be cut
Photo: “I wanted to dedicate my life and public service to this region to help it thrive,” said Julia Gehring (featured here at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore). Employed by the National Park Service out of its Denver Service Center but working as a revegetation specialist for Sleeping Bear Dunes, Gehring’s position was terminated on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14.
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
Late February may feel quiet in northern Michigan. But during a typical year the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is busy recruiting, hiring, and onboarding more than 100 seasonal workers who play crucial roles during the busy season in our National Park, so they can hit the ground running in April or May. This is not a typical year.
A federal hiring freeze and mass layoff of government employees by the Trump administration and business tycoon and senior advisor Elon Musk under his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) froze that important process and has thrown into question what services and experiences Sleeping Bear will be able to offer the approximately 1.6 million visitors who frequent this popular destination each year. The hiring freeze affects seasonal and full-time workers, including those who coordinate community volunteers.
Piping Plover photo by Alice Van Zoeren
Cast in doubt by the federal government’s actions are the roles played by: the friendly staff who greet tourists and answer questions at the Visitors Center in Empire; the workers who clear trails and charge entrance fees at the Dune Climb and Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive; the custodians who empty the trashcans and clean the bathrooms at busy areas; the helping hands who rope off areas of the dunes to protect the endangered Piping Plover, and the army of volunteers who keep hikers safe on blistering hot summer days and who facilitate the Port Oneida Fair in August.
According to Tom Ulrich — former Deputy Superintendent of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore until his retirement in September 2023, and who knows the innerworkings of the Park’s hiring process as well as anyone — Sleeping Bear typically carries a full-time staff of between 35-45 and adds another 110 seasonal workers for the busy spring, summer and fall. Unlike current Park staff who are effectively under a gag order, Ulrich can speak openly to journalists without fear of reprisal.
Former Deputy Superintendent Tom Ulrich
“Right now in February the interviewing and hiring is rolling fast and furious,” Ulrich told the Glen Arbor Sun. “The folks who interface directly with the public would be getting offers right now, and that’s not happening. The Park isn’t allowed to make any hires at this moment.
“It’s going to be very difficult to provide people with the level of service and the level of protection you need to open facilities. I don’t see how that can happen,” he added. “It might be possible to staunch some of the bleeding with volunteers. But you can’t really make a dent with so many seasonal employees missing.”
Case in point, the crew hired to protect and monitor the migratory Piping Plover, which arrives at Sleeping Bear Dunes in early April, typically begin their work in March, following a recruitment process that began in December. Ulrich described the monitoring and protection of Plover as a great success story. Without a staff dedicated to them, “the endangered species won’t have protection from dogs and other predators.”
Hiring freeze hurts Parks nationwide
Nationwide, seasonal staff often represent more than half of Park workers during the busy season. According to a press release issued on Feb. 18 by the Association of National Park Rangers (ANPR), even if the hiring freeze is relaxed for seasonal workers, the delays in hiring means most of those chosen are likely to begin work well after the summer visitor surge has begun. Many will have missed the pre-season training needed for them to offer the service quality the visiting public should expect.
“These actions will hurt visitors and the parks they travelled to see across the United States,” said ANPR president Rick Mossman. “If a visitor is involved in an automobile accident in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, or has their car broken into at a trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, there will be a delay in the response by a ranger to investigate — or perhaps no response at all. If a visitor suffers a medical emergency while hiking in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, ranger response could be delayed.”
Visitors are likely to experience reduced hours or days, and even closures, of visitor centers and other public-use facilities, Mossman added. Ranger-led educational programs will be reduced or eliminated. Trash and litter may accumulate, and restrooms will be dirtier because of reduced maintenance and fewer custodial workers.
Morale among park employees and seasonal workers is perhaps at the lowest it’s ever been, said a member of the ANPR Board of Directors. “Rangers are stressed about their own limited abilities to protect park visitors and park resources and to provide the valuable experiences that visitors deserve and have come to expect.”
Mossman worries about the long-term consequences of what is happening. “Based on what we’re seeing about the motives of some current elected and appointed officials, they are starving the parks of their budgets and staffing, and we worry that they then will conclude that the National Park Service cannot ‘adequately manage’ these singular assets and decide that they need to be ‘privatized’ for better management or developed for profit.
“Places that citizens for the past 153 years, starting with Yellowstone National Park, have asserted, though their elected representatives, are representative of our nation’s most important natural and historical resources. Once they are gone, they are gone!”
Impact on local gateway communities
Former wildlife biologist Sue Jennings
Sue Jennings, a former wildlife biologist at Sleeping Bear Dunes who retired in 2018 after 30 years of service with the National Park Service, worries about the long -term impact to agencies who are losing their institutional knowledge, expertise, and dedicated and passionate employees who have chosen to serve — combined with the fact that National Park budgets have decreased while our U.S. population continues to increase.
Despite lagging budgets, Sleeping Bear remains a key economic driver for Leelanau County and the Grand Traverse region. According to a recent National Park Service Visitor Spending Effects report, guests spent an estimated $197 million in local gateway regions while visiting the National Lakeshore in 2023. That’s money in the coffers of lodging, food and retail businesses. Tourism, in general, attracted $254 million in economies surrounding Sleeping Bear, generating more than 400,000 jobs.
Park employees, themselves, also contribute to the local economy and play integral neighborly roles in our communities.
“When I was employed at Sleeping Bear Dunes, we all would shop locally — buy our lunches and many goods and services in Empire, Glen Arbor, Leland, Frankfort, and Beulah — and take our families and friends shopping to these areas,” said Jennings.
“Often, when there was a community need, a death or a GoFundMe page, many of the staff contributed or helped out. These are not the workers that (Elon) Musk is making them out to be (wasteful, fraudulent, abusing).”
“Dedicating my life to public service”
Julia Gehring
Julia Gehring, a Benzie County resident and biologist, was employed by the National Park Service out of its Denver Service Center but worked as a revegetation specialist for Sleeping Bear Dunes until her position was terminated on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, along with eight others in the Denver office and 1,000 across the NPS.
Gehring’s employment was on probationary status, a term for those who have started a new job within the last year, even though they may be a seasoned veteran at the National Park Service. Despite receiving what she called exemplary performance reviews, Gehring told the Sun she and others “weren’t fairly treated based on our merit.” She received her termination letter at 4:30 pm not from her supervisor or management team, but from a representative with the Department of the Interior.
With Sleeping Bear under capacity, Gehring managed the revegetation and permitting for soil erosion and surface water at the Dune Climb, where a new turn lane was added last summer on M-109 to increase safety for visitors. The destination is arguably the most iconic and most visited spot in the National Lakeshore.
“It’s important to get the right plants in there to stabilize the soil along that mechanically stabilized earth wall,” she said. “We wanted to make sure that every plant there was representative of Sleeping Bear Dunes, since almost every visitor that comes to our Park enters that spot.”
Gehring worked for Sleeping Bear as a supervisory biologist from 2018-2021 until she became pregnant. During that time she oversaw 16-20 employees at the Lakeshore’s vegetation program. She returned as an NPS employee in June 2024 with a job through the Denver Service Center, she and her colleagues managed infrastructure projects in National Parks nationwide, repairing failing buildings, roads, bridges, trails and parking lots. They also helped Parks work on disaster relief and repair projects stabilizing slopes and reforesting after fires to prevent further erosion of critical infrastructure. Three of her 26 projects were in Michigan: one at Sleeping Bear, and two at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in the Upper Peninsula.
She and her husband Adam chose to live and raise their daughter, whom they named River, near the Platte in Benzie County, where Gehring learned to flyfish as a child. The nearly four-year-old girl has ridden on her mother’s back while grouse hunting, and she has pulled a perch out of the river while ice fishing.
“This is our special place, our home. We love it here,” said Gehring. “I wanted to dedicate my life and public service to this region to help it thrive. Working for the National Park Service seemed like a great way to do that.
“But now that I no longer have a job here, we’re starting to look at whether we stay or go. Being terminated under these conditions will impact my ability to get a job.”
“We get paid in sunsets”
One former Sleeping Bear Dunes employee who has worked for the National Park Service in varying capacities for more than 10 years, received an offer for a permanent position at our National Lakeshore just days before Christmas 2024. She moved to Traverse City in January and signed a rental lease, with the expectation that she would begin work on Feb. 9. But a couple days after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, she received an email and a remorseful call from Sleeping Bear’s superintendent informing her that the job offer was gone.
The individual spoke to the Sun on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional or political reprisal.
A native of Flint, she fell in love with Sleeping Bear Dunes as a child when she traveled north with her parents each summer.
“I always loved Michigan’s ecosystems, the uniqueness of our dunes, our forests, and our wildlife,” she said.
Beginning in 2015, she worked as a seasonal employee at four different Parks including Isle Royale in Lake Superior, the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, Sleeping Bear, and Acadia National Park in Maine.
“I was a seasonal for a decade prior to this, moving back and forth across the country trying to build the experience needed to land one of these ultra-competitive permanent positions, only to have it yanked out from under me,” she told the Sun last week in a teary-eyed interview. “It’s a heartbreaking and huge loss for me, and the Park.
“It was a dream come true to come back home and be hired full-time at Sleeping Bear Dunes.”
The individual wrestles with the need to find a new job in northern Michigan and pay her rent.
“The hard part is, what do I do next? Do I wait? Do I look for something temporary? Do I change careers? Do I want to invest myself somewhere else if this (Sleeping Bear) job is going to come back?”
She reflected on what her career of service with the National Park Service has meant to her.
“Working for the parks for more than 10 years has meant everything to me. It’s been a dream to serve the public and give back to these beautiful places that feel like home to me. To help people create lasting memories.
“There’s this adage that we get paid in sunsets, because we get paid way less than we would in the private sector. But the flat hat (worn by rangers) becomes part of you. You can take ranger out of the woods, but you can never take the ranger out of the person.”
She reflected on some of her more dramatic days on the job.
“I’ve done some crazy things in my career. I’ve hauled people out of the woods in the middle of the night. I’ve told people to stay away from wildlife while in my pajamas. I’ve been charged by a black bear in the Tetons. I’ve also given a kid a Junior Ranger badge later that afternoon.
“The work is worth it, despite the late nights, early mornings, and scary moments. I’ve been there on people’s worst days and on their best days. The work is important, because these parks are here for all of us.
“There are so few spots where we have the ability to access these miles of incredible Lake Michigan shoreline. Sleeping Bear allows kids from Flint or Detroit or Grand Rapids to come and explore. Without that space, what do we have?”
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