When it comes to unthinking human behavior in America’s premier nature preserve, the retired Yellowstone historian Lee Whittlesey can reel off the examples.
There is the tourist who took a selfie in front of a bison only to be tossed in the air by it. There is the drone that crashed into bubbling park waters. And then there’s the latest story, which has driven him both to vexation and to punning.
Three tourists were charged and sentenced last week for preparing supper by boiling chickens in one of the park’s natural hot springs. Not only did they “run a fowl of the law”, Whittlesey says, they “cooked their own goose” by doing something a bit harebrained.
“It surprised me,” said Whittlesey, a four-decade tour guide in the park and author of the book Death In Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. “When I place them within the larger milieu of American tourists, it probably isn’t that extraordinary.” But because they were from the region, he said, they should have known better.
Morgan Warthin, a Yellowstone spokesperson, said that two Idahoans and a Utah man toted two “cooking pots” into a remote part of the park in August, where they dipped a pair of whole raw chickens, held in a burlap sack, into one of the Shoshone Geyser Basin’s boiling geothermal features.
One of the accused told a judge his intention was to “make dinner”. The three men, all in their 40s and 50s, were handed harsh sentences, according to court documents. They received fines ranging between $540 and $1,250, and unsupervised probation; two of the men spent a couple of days in jail. All three are banned from entering Yellowstone.
The men could not be reached for comment, but they are far from alone. Since its creation in 1872, the natural wonders and wildlife of Yellowstone have endured their share of abuse. Looting and defacing of park treasures was the reason why the US army had to be called in and stationed there for decades, Whittlesey notes.
In the early years, when well-heeled tourists could only get there by railroad and tour the park via stagecoach, the geothermal features, of which Old Faithful Geyser is the most famous, have been utilized for a number of dubious purposes.
Some tourists washed their clothes in hot springs. Anglers at the West Thumb Geyser Cone, located along the shores of Yellowstone Lake, landed trout and cooked them in the scalding water. And thousands upon thousands of people tossed coins into hot pools, treating them as wishing wells. Such thoughtless actions can clog the fragile subterranean vents feeding the dozens of prismatic-hued pools.
Warthin shared statistics confirming that in 2020, there have been nearly three times more violations involving geothermal features than the recent annual average. To date this year, 122 arrests have been logged involving tourists having to post bonds and make court appearances.
These statistics do not include thousands of verbal warnings issued by rangers, or other kinds of ticketed offenses that include harassing and feeding wildlife, driving vehicles off roads and taking objects as souvenirs.
One tourist seeking a treasure allegedly hidden by a New Mexico millionaire was recently punished after digging for it in a historic Yellowstone cemetery. Two summers ago, a drunken visitor taunted an agitated bison as if he were a matador.
Basting chicken in Yellowstone’s geothermal stew is dangerous and illegal, because it involved the men walking across thin, breakable crusts above the water. In addition, the hot springs and their water chemistry, which host specially adapted and colorful mats of micro-organisms called thermophiles, are fragile.
While the chicken incident elicited chuckles, Whittlesey says danger lurks in Yellowstone. In June 2016, a young visitor died and his body was never recovered after he ventured off a boardwalk in the Norris Geyser Basin and crashed through the crust of a superheated and highly acidic spring.
“Are people ecologically and behaviorally smarter today? My cynical streak says no, but we are better in explaining the reasons why we shouldn’t do this or that than we used to be,” he says. “Still, that doesn’t stop people from causing trouble. In some ways, we are no better than the early park tourists and the problem is there’s far more of us.”
