Humor
This Summer, Come Act Like a Complete Moron at One of America’s Beautiful National Parks
Whatever bout of buffoonery you chose to engage in, there’s a National Park for you to do it in.
The wild lands of our great country are truly one of our national crowning achievements. From the mountains of Yosemite, to the valleys of the Badlands, millions the world over travel to the U.S. to enjoy our National Parks System. But for Americans, the parks are practically in our backyard. So this summer, plan a trip to a National Park, where you can do something absolutely idiotic and unfathomably dangerous in one of the majestic natural lands of our country.
National Parks offer many opportunities for you and your family to enjoy the great outdoors and to utterly ruin the experience for yourself and others. Scald yourself trying to drink from Old Faithful; lose half your ribs while attempting to touch the antlers of an elk in Yellowstone; swim nude under Havasu Falls and bruise your genitals and other soft areas of your body; or throw rocks at any number of our many birds and birdwatchers. Whatever bout of buffoonery you chose to engage in, there’s a National Park for you to do in it.
The National Parks system spans the entire country, from Acadia National Park in Maine, where you can bring your first gun into an area clearly marked not for hunting and shoot your friend’s fingers off, to Bryce Canyon in Utah, the perfect park to take video of yourself falling off a sand arch. Yes, don’t forget to document and live stream any moment where you proudly defied all logic: the world will want to see who thought setting off fireworks in Carlsbad Caverns would be praised and celebrated, and not end with burning hair and arson charges.
Our devoted staff of park rangers are there for you to argue with and to challenge to fights, whether you are drunk, high, or sober and just deeply need to defy authority. At any given time there will be a tour for you to interfere with, with knowledgeable guides who will try to placate your whims first, before it becomes apparent that you are low-key deranged and on the verge of carving your name into a hallowed 2,000 year old sequoia. Our parks are also the sites of fossil excavations for you to trespass on and controlled wildfires for you to set up camp right in the middle of, where working scientists and volunteers can point out to you that what you’re doing is dangerous, illegal, and incredibly abnormal.
At all parks, be sure to read the list of rules, guidelines, and prohibitions, and immediately rationalize why they don’t apply to you. Maybe the rule against littering seems outdated to you — that should be enough for you to disregard it and throw days worth of your garbage around in full view of other aghast park goers. Or perhaps the warning about not yelling at the foot of a snowy cliff seems to not make sense when you don’t read on to find that it’s about preventing avalanches. That’s fine — whatever you need to do that allows you to unquestionably act like there are no limits to your behavior. Just be sure to practice exclaiming, “Where’s it say that at?!” to really accentuate the dumbass thing you did.
You are in for a one of a kind experience when you visit and defile a National Park. National Parks provide access to nature in a way that frees the soul and feeds the spirit, and makes some people think they can tame an untamable wild horse. Perhaps you are not a complete stupid-acting fuck-up in your everyday life. But something about a boundless landscape can bring the moron out of anyone who wouldn’t usually steal a snake. That’s all to say, you’ll learn who you truly are in the wild, and that is likely someone who thinks there will be vending machines on a day long hike up a mountain, so they don’t bring any provisions with them whatsoever and will need to be life flighted because of a lack of trail mix.
So come to a National Park this summer. Where else can you roll a rental car that you thought you could handle driving off-road in a rocky desert? The answer is, nowhere, not even a National Park, but you sure are going to try. We’re looking forward to seeing what broken-brained thing you’ll choose to do, and at which National Park you choose to do it in!
Except when it comes to the Everglades: you fuck around at all there, and you will be shot on sight.
