Millions of visitors enjoy the wonders of nature in America’s state and national parks, whether that means the red rocks of the Red Rock Ranger District in Arizona, or the springs and geysers of Yellowstone National Park. A lot of these visitors, unfortunately, don’t know or don’t care about protecting the natural landmarks that they have the privilege of enjoying. Just ask Vanessa Hudgens, who was just fined $1000 for carving her and her boyfriend’s name into one of the aforementioned red rocks, as well as these Canadian bros who call themselves the High On Life Sunday Fundayz crew, who travel and then post about it on various social media platforms. Now they’re in some figurative hot water, because they walked too close to the Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone, which is dangerous to the ecosystem, as well to the crew themselves.
Imgur user misrepresentationsimplied posted about what the High On Life people did. They apparently walked off a designated boardwalk at the spring and filmed themselves doing it. As the imgur user points out, they probably knew better than to do this because there are signs posted about sticking to the boardwalk. A screenshot shows that they even filmed these signs.
Why is it important to stay on the boardwalks? It’s because Yellowstone’s springs are ecologically sensitive and unsafe temperature-wise for people to venture too close to, as the Huffington Post reports. To make matters worse, the High On Life Sunday Fundayz crew didn’t have a permit to film the spring either, and were actually walking on top of it as well.
High On Life posted an apology on their Facebook page, basically saying that they were so drawn to the spring, that they couldn’t help but walk right up to it to try and capture its beauty and wonder. “It was the wrong decision to make. We realize that now,” they write. A lot of people aren’t satisfied with this apology, though, such as these twitter users.
https://twitter.com/BenHorne/status/732567717195063297
https://twitter.com/bFenstermacher/status/732600531529523200
Why not post this pic of you guys defacing Grand Prismatic Spring?? pic.twitter.com/HNmjweSJSh
— GPAN (@GPANBzn) May 17, 2016
https://twitter.com/cancrx/status/732662121423601664
The imgur poster is skeptical too. “It’s hard to characterize it as a ‘misstep’ or an ‘error,’ rather than ‘deliberate, arrogant flaunting of rules’ when there are signs like this everywhere,” he writes.
So, apology not accepted? The feds have filed a criminal complaint against three of the High On Life members for what they did. They got off even worse so far than the people who “rescued” a baby bison by putting it in the trunk of their car.
(Via imgur and Huffington Post)
