Jenny McCarty is a national parks junkie—her water bottle is covered in stickers from the NPS sites she’s visited over the years.
So when the U.S. national parks became a political football this past Thanksgiving, McCarty, who is an artist in Boulder, Colorado, came up with a crafty form of civil disobedience that involves—you guessed it—stickers.
“I was really fired up,” McCarty, 34, told Outside. “I don’t want to see a politician on my parks pass.”
In case you haven’t seen the headlines, here’s the backstory. In late November, the Department of the Interior unveiled a controversial new design for the America the Beautiful National Parks Pass, the annual season pass for America’s 433 NPS sites.
The credit card-sized pass traditionally features artwork or photography that honors the parks. But for 2026, some of the passes will feature a visage of U.S. President Donald Trump alongside George Washington.
The design prompted a loud uproar online when it was unveiled. Critics piout that the Trump Administration has done more to erode the NPS through staff cuts, budget cuts, and buyouts than any U.S. president in recent memory. The new design also prompted a lawsuit from an environmental nonprofit called the Center for Biological Diversity, which argued that the image of Trump violates a federal law requiring the design to be chosen from a photo competition.
McCarty, who works in water resource management by day but operates her own art business in her free time, was one of the many NPS fans who were angered by the pass design.
“I’ve been feeling discouraged and disheartened by what’s been happening with the national parks this year,” she said. “I wanted to try and find a way to capture the spirit of what the parks mean to me.”
In a short video posted to her art company’s Instagram page, McCarty filmed herself placing a sticker of one of her paintings over Trump’s image on a pass. The picture was of a Pika, a mountain rodent that lives in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park.
Likes and messages poured in from her Instagram followers. The proverbial lightbulb flicked on.
“I kept seeing messages of outrage and a desire from my followers to have something else on the parks pass,” she said. “Why can’t I provide a solution?
McCarty created stickers that are the exact dimensions of the parks pass that can be placed over the images of Trump and Washington. You peel the stickers off of an adhesive back, align the red-white-and-blue stripes, and voila, the pass is transformed.
Each sticker features one of her three NPS-inspired paintings: one shows a grizzly bear staring at Denali; another depicts a wolf howling in front of the Grand Tetons; the third is of her beloved Pika, munching wildflowers in front of snow-covered peaks inside Rocky Mountain National Park.
Each sticker includes a cutout for the pass’s diamond-shaped demarcation for its classification: Resident or Military.
McCarty displayed her creation on her Instagram page, and within a few days, the orders began to roll in.
“It snowballed,” she said. “Everything came together really fast.”
So, she began selling them through the commercial website of her art business, Sage Leaf Studio. McCartney told Outside that she has received 650 orders for the stickers as of December 15. She is charging $6 for them, but donating all profits to the National Parks Conservation Association and the National Parks Foundation.
As of December 16, McCarty said she had not received any messages from the National Park Service or the Department of the Interior asking to stop. She plans to continue selling the stickers as long as people order them.
McCarty doesn’t know whether the stickers will improve her overall business, nor does she care. She said that her measure of success for the project is more about tapping into her fans’ emotions than generating revenue.
“It was a gut feeling that there could be momentum behind this sentiment,” she said. “I just decided to make it happen.”
The post When Trump’s Face Appeared on National Parks Passes, This Artist Created an Alternative appeared first on Outside Online.
