In May of last year, a shaky video was uploaded to Youtube featuring several men vandalizing Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Pool by ignoring clearly posted signage prohibiting them from walking in the pool area. The video was created by the Canadian brand “High On Life” as part of a marketing campaign, but it quickly drew outrage. After the initial negative reaction, the group attempted to eliminate the evidence by deleting pictures posted online and the video itself, which resurfaced and has since received more than 375 thousand views. While the group maintained it’s silence in an attempt to avoid scrutiny, calls for arrests grew louder and louder until finally resulting in prosecution this month. All participants featured in the video have been heavily fined, all have lost their park privileges, and two are being forced to spend one week in jail.
Hamish Cross plead guilty to foot travel in a thermal area and creating a disturbance, which resulted in an $8,000 fine as well as a five year ban from public parks in the United States.
Alexey Andriyovych Lyakh and Charles Ryker Gamble plead guilty to disorderly conduct by creating a hazardous condition, as well as foot travel in a thermal area. They also were found guilty of using drones and bikes in closed areas, as well as performing commercial photography without a permit. These charges were resulting from actions they performed at several national parks including Yellowstone, Zion, Death Valley and Mesa Verde. They will both spend 7 days in jail, pay a $2,000 fine each. They are also banned from US parks for five years and must perform community service in benefit of Yellowstone. Justis Cooper Price-Brown will pay a higher $3,500 in fines and restitution instead of going to jail, and is not allowed in US parks for five years.
In the video seen above, the men are seen trampling the thermal area of the Grand Prismatic Pool, an area of Yellowstone protected for its sensitive ecological state in order to preserve its beauty. For the sake of advertising a brand, these men showed a complete irreverence for the fact that this type of action creates damage to these environments, and will potentially destroy them forever for future visitors. Bindlestiff Tours urges all visitors to national parks to respect the posted rules and not do damage to these “impossible to replace” areas. They are one of a kind, and if they are vandalized or harmed in any way, they are impossible to repair.
This careless act is reminiscent of the vandalization of “the racetrack” area of Death Valley national park last year, when cars and bikes were ridden across the area for no particular reason. The damage was in the form of tire tracks across the smooth desert floor, and will take upwards of 100 years or more to finally return to its state before the vandalism. The damage that is caused to these areas will ruin them for everyone else, and we hope that fines and jail time are not the only motivating factor to keep people from performing these careless acts.