A man has been charged with multiple violations for walking to the very lip of Old Faithful's spout/Kurt Repanshek file
Walking on the travertine cone that spreads out from the fount of Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park is clearly marked as being illegal, but that didn't stop a man from doing just that and appearing to urinate into the geyser.
"This is the Park Service! Get on the boardwalk!" a ranger yelled at the man, who strolled to the edge of the geyser on Friday.
With his back to her, the man appeared to urinate, and then laid down on the cone and looked into it.
"Oh my gosh, what an idiot," a bystander could be heard saying on a video that captured the man's actions.
"Get on the boardwalk!" the ranger again yelled, but the man continued to ignore her. "Get off Old Faithful!"
"Come on Old Faithful, erupt now," another bystander could be heard saying.
The man, whose name was not being released by the park, was charged with multiple violations, including being off-trail in a thermal area.
“We take these cases very seriously,” said Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk, “The law requires people to stay on boardwalks or marked trails in thermal areas. Anyone who ignores this law risks their life and possibly the lives of emergency personnel.”
Geysers and hot springs are incredibly dangerous: many people have been injured or killed by underestimating that danger, a park release said.
A park spokesman said Tuesday that there was no reported damage to the travertine cone caused by the man.
Back in 2016 an Oregon man walked far off the boardwalk in Yellowstone's Norris Geyser Basin and fell into an unnamed hot spring and was dissolved by the hot waters.
Down through the decades there have been relatively few deaths in the park's hot springs, just 22 before the 2016 incident, according to park records. But with hot spring waters that simmer around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and thin surface crusts rimming the features that can collapse under an individual's weight without warning, the geyser basins are inherently dangerous.
"...hot springs deaths have ocurred much more commonly in Yellowstone National Park than have grizzly bear deaths," Yellowstone historian Lee Whittlesey wrote in his book, Death In Yellowstone, Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. "The park has around 10,000 hot springs, geysers, mudpots, and steam vents scattered over its mountain plateau. Though collectively called thermal features today, all are technically hot springs. Most are hotter than 150 degrees F and many reach temperatures of 185-205 degrees F."
Comments
This guys a idoit and he should be arrested spend at least 30 days in jail and pay a fine,
People like this ruin National Parks fir all
of us that do Appreciate them,
Could NOT agree with you more, except for the 'kid' element. Let these people be their own object lesson. You're right; eventually, the attraction would be fenced off to the point where there would be no point in coming to see it. That would be a greater tragendy than the loss of an idiot.
You're right! It wasn't political. It was ignorant and uncaring. Not everyone staying was a "daredevil" challenging mother nature. Many were simply people without means to leave. Unreliable transportation, lack of means to travel a couple hundred miles, pay for hotel costs, meals, loss of work, living from paycheck to paycheck. Don't judge so harshly... for some, life can be harder than you imagine.
Not as hard as death. Driving around barriers, driving/walking into rushing water, running generators indoors, plugging in extension cords while standing in water, exceeding safe driving speeds on wet roads, those have nothing to do with living from paycheck to paycheck. There were plenty of offers of free transportation and free lodging, noone was working in the evacuation zones- except the emergency workers. These people made poor choices.
I'm not getting this. Who is blaming a victim? The moron/scofflaw walked out on an area where, if he had one functioning brain cell, he knew was off-limits. He's on a level with the beer-bellies who pushed over the Goblin Valley Rocks or the little snip who graffitied several parks. What in heaven's name does this have to do with natural disasters, rescuers or Faux News? Or are you saying the Media Evil Empire made it all up? Gee, maybe Old Faithful is just a hoax too!
It sounded like people were mixing up the ciminals you mentioned (bad people) with victims of national disasters (bad people?).
He often throws in gratuitous references to unrelated events or to inject specifically political (although not necessarily partisan) views. And sometimes I get hooked into it even though I should know better. I get that sometimes politics can't necessarily be separated from a particular issue, but I still don't get what the point was of mentioning storm evacuation orders as it relates to entering an off-limits area in a federal recreation area.
Back to the actual topic - these guys are kind of like the "High on Life" clowns from British Columbia. Of course three of them died doing something dangerous, but I believe two of the deceased were previously banned for five years from US federal parkslands, after various stunts on NPS and BLM lands. Not all were specifically dangerous, such as off-road vehicle driving in Death Valley or water skiing over the wet salt at Bonneville.
Hmmm - a government telling you to stay out of an area and a government telling you to leave an area both for your own safety. No relation?
But then non-evacuation was only one of a list of items I mentioned. My point was that in both the case of Yellowstone and Florence, it isn't the park or the storm that kills people (with some exceptions), it is primarily stupid acts by people. Understanding that has important implications for public policy. As Wittlesey writes:
"Althoug the title of this book uses the wrod "accidents" for the sake of communication, I want to make it clear that most of these incidents were caused by foolhardiness or negligence, ....or were purposeful. Stupidity and negligence have been big elements in these stories; very few were true "accidents"....