We’ve never been to a national park and not come away in awe. The natural beauty, scale, and diversity of landscapes always blows our mind.
But you can bet there’s always someone out there oblivious to the beauty, probably preferring a shopping mall to a hike in the woods. Those people are terrible. But they also make for hilarious tongue-in-cheek posters, created by Amber Share, who gathers real 1 star reviews of these places on Yelp. She creates hilarious, hand lettered posters decrying the Grand Canyon “A hole. A very, very large hole.”
The project is called Subpar Parks. What started as a lettering exercise on Instagram grew into a bestselling book in 2021, then a second volume covering parks around the world, plus enough postcards, puzzles and prints to fill a ranger station gift shop. Share’s trick is that the posters are sincere. The landscapes are drawn with real affection in the style of the WPA park posters of the 1930s, and only the words are dumb, so the joke is always on the reviewer rather than the place. Check out more of her work on Instagram at @subparparks.
For the parks themselves, without the reviews, see the five least visited national parks, the Fifty-Nine Parks poster series, and more real one-star reviews of amazing national parks. And when you are ready to go, Campgrounder, our own campsite finder, covers the campgrounds in and around them.
