Seriously, People? Tourists Using Yellowstone Park Geysers as Dumpsters

Well, when you have nearly 3 million people (so far this year) pay you a visit, there's apparently going to be some slobs.

But it's not just the discarded items, it's the sheer volume of them. We were alerted to this story written by Montana Grant, a weekly contributor to the Montana Outdoor Radio Show website.

Yellowstone National Park is the home to many wonderful geothermal features. These include geysers and hot pools, springs, and terraces. Tourists see some of these beautiful places as ideal spots to dump their trash. Recent visitors to the park may have noticed the hoards of visitors and Park Rangers with large mechanical poles. These expandable tools are required to retrieve tourist trash from the natural features.

Park staff can count large volumes of coins, water bottles, face masks, socks, towels, hats, diapers, handkerchiefs, drones (yep, more on that in a second) and more commonly found in the 250-degree pools. Montana Grant told us that a ranger he talked to complained about retrieving several face masks a day from geysers.

A tourist from the Netherlands was recently fined $3,200 for crashing his drone into the 121-foot-deep Grand Prismatic pool. He lost control of his drone, which are not allowed in the Park. The drone has not been recovered.

This is not a new problem, but apparently it is getting worse. Several current geyser eruptions have spewed trash from a century ago. Dated coins, gear, logs, and even a couch are on the list of Geyser Garbage.