With 63 national parks and hundreds of sites and monuments spread out across the United States, there are countless ways that different agencies choose to rank and classify them.
Some look at which are the cheapest and most expensive to visit — the latter would be, because of its remote location, Alaska’s Gates of the Arctic — while others have looked at everything from visitor numbers to accommodation quality and the likelihood of danger.
Due to the high numbers of people crossing through it to get into the United States from Mexico, the “most dangerous” title is claimed by Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus.
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Located in the south-central region of Kentucky, Mammoth Cave National Park has in recent years become associated with poor visitor reviews and low placement on different ratings of the “best and worst” national parks to visit.
National Park to visitors: ‘Come experience what has disappointed millions’
While Google (GOOGL) ratings for Mammoth Cave are currently at a quite high 4.7 out of five, there are also thousands of reviews calling the park known for valleys and an extensive cave system “boring” and “not worth the drive.”
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Staff working at Mammoth Cave must have had enough of the bad-mouthing and decided to fight back with its own social media post saying that a “world of regret awaits” anyone who chooses to come there.
“Come experience what has disappointed millions of people for over 225 years!” the National Park Service working out of Mammoth Cave wrote in a Facebook (META) post at the end of August. “Mammoth Cave National Park recently rated as one of the ‘most disappointing U.S. tourist attractions!’ While we think the world’s longest cave system and over 4,000 years of human history is AMAZING, others find that the cave is ‘very dark’ and there is ‘nothing cool’ here to see.”
The sarcastic post continues to describe “unfulfilling” parts of the parks and things one can do there such as stalactites, stalagmites and more than 80 miles of hiking and horseback-riding trails.
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Visitors appreciate the joke: ‘I don’t know why I keep coming back’
The post was extremely well-received with over 104,000 upvotes for an account that only has 118,000 followers. Many fans of the park particularly appreciated the post and described the good times they had exploring it.
“I've been disappointed in the place since I was six,” wrote a commenter named Mark Thornberry. “61 years of being let down (pun fully intended). I don't know why I keep coming back.”
The NPS regularly uses gentle humor to promote certain parks, release information about park news and put out PSAs about rules and being a good visitor.
After a string of incidents in which parkgoers to Yellowstone got injured after disregarding basic rules around animal safety and getting too close to bison they came across, the NPS put out an X post telling visitors to "believe in yourself like visitors who believe they can pet a bison."
The post was one of the NPS X account’s most popular and gathered over 78,000 upvotes within a few days of it being posted.
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