‘No Bigfoot here :/’: NM national park visitors troll Trump effort to nix anti-American signs

When the National Park Service solicited comments last year from national park and monument visitors for educational signs or historical markers that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” the agency received hundreds of comments from those visiting a dozen such sites in New Mexico. 

But not one of 738 comments the National Park Service received identified inappropriate signage, according to a Source NM review of the comments the service released late last month in a response to a public records request from the environmentalist group, the Sierra Club.

Instead, the comments New Mexico national park visitors submitted offered defenses of the national park system, chastised the U.S. Interior Department for seeking to “whitewash” American history or simply trolled the federal government.

“No lava,” complained one visitor to the Capulin Volcano National Monument in northern New Mexico, regarding monument “services that need improvement.” The volcano last erupted 37,000 years ago. 

Six other comments at Capulin and other New Mexico parks grumbled about the lack of Bigfoot. 

In a statement announcing the release of more than 35,000 comments visitors submitted at national parks nationwide, the Sierra Club said the overwhelmingly negative reactions show that “the public expects those stories to be interpreted with accuracy, transparency, and integrity, not narrowed to fit a political agenda.” 

President Donald Trump in March 2025 issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to look for signs that disparaged Americans or otherwise distracted from “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

As part of that order, signs posted at national parks solicited feedback and connected visitors to a website to submit comments. 

The resulting database includes comments at New Mexico’s 12 national parks and monuments submitted between June 2025 and January of this year. The most comments — a little more than 100 — came from visitors to Bandelier National Monument. 

“I saw a sign asking for reports of negative information — honestly, only that sign is negative,” one Bandelier visitor wrote in mid-June. “The rest is just history, you walnuts. Stop being a bunch of snowflakes and accept that not all American history is good. But it’s all important.”

Many of the comments are identical, including 90 identical that describe “disgust, shock and frankly, embarrassment at what this current administration is forcing the NPS to do.”

The National Park Service also collected comments during a government shutdown last October that resulted in national park staff furloughs and closures. Many of the comments describe frustration at being unable to visit the sites during that 43-day shutdown that occurred due to an impasse over federal immigration enforcement funding.

“This is a disgrace!” one visitor to Capulin wrote Oct. 9. “This is one of the best specimens of [an] inactive volcano in the continental United States, and it should be celebrated. Not understaffed and underfunded.”