| Note: | Adult male noted to be climbing down to Great Fountain formation near boardwalk despite a multi-voiced roar of disapproval from crowd there for GF. He bent over in a way that suggested he was doing the typical brain-dead tourist thing of proving great to themselves that, yes, that water is truly hot. (Truthfully, GF was winding way down and he barely set foot on the outer ring of the formation. I got a snap of him talking to Paul, and he turned out to be a first-time visitor from France or French Canada. His issue was that his adult daughter (family vacation) had gotten into a verbal shouting match over whether to stay at GF or move on, at which point the daughter grabbed the car key and hucked it at the geyser and stomped off toward White Dome. The poor fellow was shaking and entering what sounded like an episode of cough variant asthma. The snide comments like "thanks for ruining our national parks" and "I don't care about your key," while perfectly warranted 99.999999% of the time, exacerbated this situation. This gentleman was I think doing the best he could in a difficult situation in a new country where the official language is not his mother tongue. Of all the people who addressed him face to face, none cared to hear about the circumstances that led him to violate the rules about conducting himself while in thermal basins. Paul at least listened to his story, and we went with him to make sure his key worked after its little dip in the runoff channel. We did offer to go radio for help or run back to one of the ranger stations to secure help. Like most other gazers, we go BFC when we see people disregard rules like these for selfish or clueless reasons, but I think this was a situation where a little compassion could have gone a long way. Granted, a better solution would have been to flag down a ranger or volunteer to retrieve the item, but how was he to have know? With the language barrier, where could he even have started? I just mention this (yes, I know by now this has turned into the Great American Novel) in case this family is picked up by the Protectives. The father was only trying to retrieve his key; it was the adult daughter who instigated the issue by throwing "things into the thermal features." |
