When leaked data revealed a plan to remove hundreds of historic signs, one outdoorsman created an interactive guide to archive them before they disappear forever.
Since March 2025, the Trump Administration has removed or altered hundreds of signs and exhibits in national parks across the country (Photo: Fly View Productions/Getty Images)
Published March 19, 2026 03:56PM
When public lands advocate Mike Beebe saw the Trump Administration erasing stories from America’s national parks, he took action.
Since March 2025, the Trump Administration has removed or altered hundreds of signs and exhibits in national parks across the country, covering controversial topics ranging from climate change and pollution to slavery and Indigenous history. That’s why Beebe, 42, created MissingParkHistory.org, an interactive website that documents every piece of media flagged for removal. A resident of California and father of two, Beebe says he grew up outside, backpacking and camping on public land.
“The outdoors, and our national parks, have always been important to me,” he told Outside. He briefly served as a ranger in Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, worked for the advocacy group Sierra Club, and taught math in rural North Carolina.
“That teaching experience, in particular, really opened my eyes to the deep injustices and inequities our country still faces,” he said. Beebe says he saw those same inequities playing out on a national scale when Trump enacted a March 2025 executive order mandating the Department of the Interior (DOI), the agency that manages national parks and other public lands, to remove signs that disparage past or living Americans.
Within months of the order, the National Park Service (NPS) pulled signs like those describing climate change in Glacier National Park or air pollution in Bryce Canyon. Others flagged for removal included exhibits on slavery and civil rights, LGBTQ history, WWII-era internment camps, and Indigenous histories.
Beebe wondered who would stand up.
“I was curious, were park rangers going to do anything?” he said. “When was the public going to push back? When is this going to break?”
He saw his chance on March 2, 2026, when an anonymous whistleblower published a list of all the exhibits, signs, and publications the DOI flagged for removal. The leaked data consisted of hundreds of folders and a massive Excel spreadsheet. It was helpful, but he said it was difficult to parse through.
“I realized that this information was very important and powerful for those people who want to prevent these removals. So, props to the person who leaked it, because all the data was there. But it’s a massive trove of data, with so many individual files, so I also wondered how people would digest it,” he said.
That’s when Beebe decided to create a virtual map, something people could easily search and interact with.
“I wanted people to be able to visualize the scale of this, and quickly see everything,” he said.
Beebe joins a growing list of public land advocates documenting the removals. His site features 863 signs, exhibits, and publications on the DOI’s potential chopping block. It notes which are scheduled for removal, flagged for review, or have been restored by court order. When users click on an entry, they can see the original exhibit and the reason why the DOI flagged it for removal.
Although he’s not a computer programmer, Beebe has a history of civic tech savvy. In 2018, he entered the Parks and Tech Challenge, a competition in which teams developed tech-based solutions to issues facing national parks. Beebe’s team won the event and was sent to Washington, D.C., to present their work to Congress. Some of their ideas were ultimately bundled into the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act, which provided $6.5 billion to address maintenance backlogs in national parks and other public lands.
Beebe says his past work with public lands made the sign removals all the more frustrating. The removals, he added, feel like an attempt to sanitize the past.
“You can’t just remove history,” he said. “These exhibits on slavery that they want to remove, that is real history that we have to face, learn from, and move forward with. These signs are historically, environmentally, and culturally very important. Removing them is detrimental to everyone: our children, our society, and the parks themselves.”
Beebe told Outside that there wasn’t one particular sign or topic that spurred him to action, but rather the principle behind their removals. He sees his project as both a way to archive American history in national parks and a catalyst to spark change.
“My hope is that this will create some outrage in people,” he said. “We need that momentum to pressure Congress, motivate people to protest, and ultimately find a way to stop these removals.”
