A hat on the travertine terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — There are some units of the National Park System to which I could return again and again. Yellowstone National Park is one of those places. I don’t live very close, but each time I visit, I feel a sense of ownership in this special landscape. So, I’m always a bit annoyed whenever I see detritus such as zip loc bags, paper wrappers, and hats littering such environmentally fragile places as Midway Geyser Basin and Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces.

As a photographer, it’s easy for me to remove that "anthropogenic detritus" (a fancy term for human trash) from an image with the click of a mouse button. It’s called “cloning out” and lately, with advances in AI technology, Adobe Photoshop has gotten spot-on at removing the trash and leaving the background pristine.

But it’s not so easy as a mouse button click to physically remove hats and other stuff from the hydrothermals in Yellowstone. People are needed for that duty. People with some training, very long grabber poles (including fishing poles), and on occasion, a willingness to venture off the boardwalk or trail out onto potentially dangerous landscape to retrieve that trash.

Recently, I spoke via phone with park geologist Jeff Hungerford, a volcanologist who earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and spent time with the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, before joining the park staff at Yellowstone several years ago. I asked him how they pick up those hats perched way out on those hydrothermal features.

"I have a team of seasonal employees that have a background in geology, so they know kind of what they are stepping on. These areas are incredibly fragile and very, very dangerous," said Hungerford. "So, we go through a whole bunch of training and we actually work on how to retrieve trash. We use a lot of long grabber utensils and we also do a bit of damage mitigation, or rehabilitation, in these areas, too."

According to Hungerford, some team members are returning crew, while others are new. The training takes approximately two weeks.

"We try to slowly break people in, if they are new to the crew," he said. "It takes a bit to become familiar, and we make sure people don't get pushed out of their comfort level doing this work until they feel like they understand the area."

Team members are taught how to retrieve trash using long grabber poles. In addition landscape damage mitigation/rehabilitation, they learn how to leave minimal evidence of their presence — including not leaving traces of their footsteps in those shallow-water, patterned areas around hydrothermal features such as what you see at Midway Geyser Basin.

Park staff removing a hat from PaletteSpring at Mammoth Terraces, Yellowstone National Park / NPS - Jacob W. Frank

I asked Hungerford if they ever needed to step off trail to retrieve trash or if their grabbing instruments were long enough to be able to reach way out there to retrieve those hats. 

"Oh, I think the longest one we have is probably 10 feet or so. We are always playing with trying to get longer poles. We're still working on getting ones that work well — sometimes we use a fishing rod. But, there are other times when we actually do have to get into these dangerous and very fragile areas off the boardwalk or the trail. I'm happy that people [who lose their hats or other trash] don't go after the stuff — their hats and such. I praise them for that and if we are in the area, we are more than happy to come and retrieve something for people.

"We are a very small team and we specifically train for this. We use IR [infra red] cameras [to detect heat loss] or we usually have some kind of device to check temperatures. This ground is inherently dangerous and areas are prone to be undermined. We know what these areas are by knowing the lithology [physical rock characteristics] of the area," Hungerford told me.

The geologist added that his cleanup team training "includes understanding water chemistry, what kind of lithologies will precipitate out of that water, how newly-precipitated rock hardens over time, and what lithologies are prone to destabilization. The crew learns clues about the area, such as rock weathering and what kind of rocks are prone to being more easily undermined by hydrothermal waters. We talk about ways to recognize hot ground from cooler ground and learn a whole bunch of clues to tell us what ground is a little less dangerous for us to walk on."

He mentioned during the winter, for instance, frozen water and snow vs. cleared areas are good indicators of hot and cool spots.

I asked how often cleanup of an area takes place and whether there was a specific season during which they concentrate more heavily on cleanup.

"We try to hit every area every week. Sometimes when it gets really windy, we will try to hit Midway Geyser Basin twice a week or so. The thing with my team is that they are very busy, and sometimes they get called off to other work helping other facility staff or law enforcement rangers to go do something, so we get pulled off sometimes and might not make it twice a week to an area," Hungerford said. "We do try to clean up as much as possible in the winter months because we have a short winter season, of course. And we keep an eye out for areas like Mammoth, which we can get to a lot more easily in the winter. We really start kicking it off in late April when the park opens for the summer season."

The largest piece of trash Hungerford and his team ever pulled out of a hydrothermal area had to be the submerged vehicle pulled from an acidic thermal feature near Roaring Mountain this past July. But they have also pulled out pine tree trunks people have thrown into hot springs, as well.

While wandering the boardwalks, you may have noticed signage. Some are informational about a particular hydrothermal feature, while other signs warn against stepping off the boardwalk or trail. I asked Hungerford whether there were signs specifically about keeping hats tighter on heads or making sure their coat/vest pockets were closed.

"The vast majority of people don't intend to lose trash, and we have looked at signage and put signage up about winds and hats, especially in Midway Geyser Basin," he replied. "We actually collect data to look at the efficacy of our signage, because we don't want to over sign everything and diminish the visitor experience, but we also want to make sure people don't step off the boardwalk."

Hungerford and his team keep notes of where trash is found and which areas are more prone to being trash "hot spots." Once they determine where these spots of heavier trash accumulation are located, they try to clean up those particular areas a little more often than their normal routine. 

An unexpected gust of wind on a loose-fitting hat or an unbuttoned pocket can accidentally blow chapeau or pocket contents down onto a hot spring or travertine terrace. If that happens to you, please don't try to retrieve it yourself. It’s better to leave retrieval and removal to  Ranger Hungerford's team of cleanup professionals. And, if those professionals happen to be around the area at the time, they are more than happy to retrieve that windswept hat for you.

Some of the hats removed from hot springs during the 2018 summer, Yellowstone National Park / NPS - Jacob W. Frank