In more strange national park news this week, three people were ticketed at Yellowstone National Park for wandering off the boardwalk and up to the edge of Old Faithful to take photos of the famous geyser up close.
The incident was caught on video by a live webcam of the geyser, and occurred only minutes before the geyser erupted. Lucky for them, the person that monitors and operates the webcam saw a group of about 30 visitors standing around the edge of the geyser taking photos. He alerted a ranger who was able to get the curious visitors back onto the boardwalk just minutes before it erupted.
Park spokesman Al Nash said he hasn’t seen an incident like this in a long time. This could have been a much more dangerous situation. He says of the incident, “Thirty people were clustered about the cone of an active geyser. Certainly if it would have erupted while they were in that area, we would have found ourselves responding to an incident with many people seriously hurt.”
The group was part of a tour that arrived via bus. The three people fined were the tour guide, bus driver, and the man that appeared to have started the incident (which led others in the group to believe it was acceptable to walk off the boardwalk). The group claimed they did not see the signs warning of the danger and fines associated with leaving the boardwalk. Nash found this hard to believe because there are a number of places where it is virtually impossible to miss the warnings.
This is the first off-season that Old Faithful has been open to vehicle traffic, and the park is operating on a skeleton staff. Even in the summer season, Yellowstone does not have the personnel capacity to have a ranger monitor the geyser (and the tourists near the geyser) around the clock. Nash says he wishes they could, but it’s just not possible.
Watch the video and read more about the incident on the Bozeman Daily Chronicle’s website.
While there in 2000, we witnessed an elderly woman with a family roaming around off the boardwalk. I snapped a photo of the old gal walking beside a sign that explicitly said it was off limits for pedestrians! Idiots.
this is so crazy! it is so obvious when you are in Yellowstone that you are forewarned about the dangers of the geysers, hot springs etc…. I sometimes wonder about people’s common sense!