Yellowstone Has Pulled a Record Amount of Trash From Its Hot Springs This Year

It’s been a record-setting year at Yellowstone National Park — not for visitation, not for geological activity, but for how much stuff park staff have had to fish out of one of the world’s most irreplaceable natural landscapes.

By early October, the park’s geology team had removed 23,600 pieces of trash, 10,700 rocks and sticks, and 369 hats from Yellowstone’s geysers, hot springs, mud pots, and fumaroles — plus the boardwalks and trails surrounding them. That’s not including what’s been lost, submerged too deep to retrieve, or already done its damage.

The items range from the predictable to the genuinely baffling. Coins, sunglasses, water bottles. Also: five AirPods, six Invisalign retainers, rubber ducks, golf tees, junior ranger badges, fortune cookie fortunes, fake nails, floss picks, eight mini race cars, three Delta flight pins, a miniature copy of The Vampire Diaries, a McDonald’s toy from 2010, Polaroid photos, pacifiers, an inhaler, and a single Uno card.

The park’s geology team called the retainers, fake nails and floss picks among the ‘grossest’ finds of the season.

What This Is Actually Doing to the Pools