Two tourists at Yellowstone National Park were caught walking across the crust of its largest hot spring. That’s not only illegal, but also highly dangerous.
Tanya Saueressig, a 55-year-old tattoo artist from Livingston, Montana, captured and posted a video of the two visitors crossing a colorful microbial mat at the Grand Prismatic Spring on Sunday.
“I thought I was going to watch people die,” Saueressig said. “They were walking on a living organism that’s not solid ground. They could break right through it, and every step they take, it’s destroying this entire ecosystem underneath their feet, leaving permanent scars.” In spring 2025, a bison died after wandering into the Grand Prismatic.
Yellowstone National Park strictly prohibits such behavior.
“Burns from thermal features are a common cause of serious injury and death in the park,” the park’s public affairs office wrote in an email after the incident, adding that “scalding water underlies most of the thin, breakable crust around hot springs.”
Human misbehavior is not uncommon at Yellowstone. An entire Instagram account, aptly named “touronsofyellowstone,” is devoted to documenting tourists breaking park rules. It showcases footage of visitors taking selfies with bison, trekking through boiling mud ponds and engaging in other misbehavior.
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