Registered: 01/04/02
Posts: 1228
Loc: Eastern MA, USA
The article hinted at most of the springs legally being inaccessible. Often they are surrounded by a thin, brittle crust that can give way under a person's weight. More than the chicken could be cooked. Another issue is many of the springs have toxic minerals. There is a famous fishing hole hot spring. Before this was well known, it was popular to dunk one's fish into the spring to cook it. It turned out that the spring had a high content of something toxic, maybe arsenic. It's been at least 20 years since I visited Yellowstone, so some details of presentations are fuzzy now.
Oh Em Gee! I'm not surprised, but still amazed how bad decisions like this can seem smart. In my teens, I worked in Yellowstone and I can tell you that every ranger has a collection of stories about bad decisions like this.
We were told about the thin crusts around thermal features, and in a couple of instances some breakthroughs (from bison trying to say warm over winter) were pointed out to us. My teenage brain didn't think they looked like much, but I still kept my distance.
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