Cash payments for cave tour tickets will no longer be accepted at Wind Cave National Park as of June 15/NPS file
If you want to camp at Wind Cave National Park or go underground on a cave tour, you'll have to pay with a credit card as the park won't accept cash payments as of June 15.
Cave tours, camping and pass sales are important sources of revenue used to improve the visitor experience at Wind Cave National Park, including road and facility repairs and maintenance, trail and campground improvements, installation of accessible exhibits, visitor and resource protection services, and more.
Moving to a cashless system allows the park to be better stewards of visitor dollars by reducing the cost of collecting and managing fees, increasing the amount of fee revenue available to support critical projects and visitor services, and improving accountability and reducing risk, a park release said.
Comments
As I look at my Federal Reserve Notes, they specifically state "this note is legal tender for ALL debts, public and private."
Take your legal tender to a soda pop machine and you have no guarantee that being right will get your thirst quenched.
That's a common misunderstanding of the meaning of legal tender. It legally only refers to payment of a debt.
How does this decision affect those who do not qualify for credit cards? And please remember all of us "own" the parks and should be able to access parks and pay user fees with cash checks or credit cards.
While I understand the concerns of pricing out people from parks, something makes me think that it's unlikely you'll be visiting a park if you can't qualify for a credit card. I would think you'd have bigger fish to fry at that point.
I share the concerns of those who fear that accessing our public lands will become even more unaffordable to the common person. This is an important reason to write your representatives and push for more appropriated funding from Congress to the NPS so that parks don't need to increase or start charging fees to offset administrative and other park operational costs. If parks are backed into a corner where they feel that charging or increasing fees is the way to go, then that means that they're not getting enough flexible funding from Congress to address their needs.