Tourists Blamed for Ruining Once-Breathtaking Yellowstone Thermal Pool
Morning Glory Pool, located in the Upper Geyser Basin near Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, used to appear as the dazzling crystal-clear blue color that inspired its name. However, after decades of visitors throwing coins, trash, and other debris into it, Morning Glory now resembles many of the other prismatic thermal pools found within the park, with a deep center green bleeding into a ring of yellow.
“There are some lovely quotes about its beauty and stunning blue colors, and likening it to the Morning Glory flower,” Yellowstone National Park historian Alica Murphy told the Cowboy State Daily. Murphy explained that when tourists first began visiting in the 1880s, the concepts of conservancy and “leave no trace” hadn’t yet existed, and people essentially treated the park’s colorful thermal pools as “wishing wells.”
“I think many people like to throw things into pools,” she continued. “Wishing wells are a time-honored tradition. Flip a coin into a wishing well and make a wish. There is something about a pool of water that gives humans a weird instinct to throw things into it.”
As far as the scientific reason for the changing color, decades of throwing debris into the pool has caused the temperature of the water to physically cool down.
“Temperature is a huge factor,” said Mike Poland, scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. “Hotter pools tend to be a brilliant blue, and cooler pools can be more colorful since bacteria can grow there. At Morning Glory, the temperature cooled because people throwing objects in caused the conduit to become partially blocked, and the temperature went down, allowing different types of bacteria to grow.”
Up until the early ’90s, crews used to actually clean out the thermal pools of Yellowstone, however the process was laborious both in order to assure the safety of the park employees and ensure that the delicate balance of the thermal pools didn’t experience further damage.
Former Yellowstone ranger Jeff Henry, who has worked in the park for nearly 50 years, was part of the last team to clean out Morning Glory Pool in 1991. Though, he said it won’t happen again.
“We used a couple of fire trucks to pump down the pool’s water level and shoot it into the Firehole River,” Henry recalled. “A guy was hooked up to a climbing harness so that he wouldn’t fall into the pool, and he was out there with a long-handled net, fishing things out of the water far down into the crater of the pool.”
“We found tons, probably thousands of coins,” he continued. “The main park road used to go right by Morning Glory, so that would account for some of the metal parts that looked like car parts chucked into the bottom of the pool. There were a lot of rocks that didn’t belong there, and I think we found some hats that probably had blown off people’s heads and landed in the pool. And they, wisely, didn’t try to retrieve them.”
But aside from the inherent dangers of cleaning the thermal pools, Henry said another reason why they no longer undergo the process is because park visitors are generally more responsible these days. And given that Yellowstone has naturally adapted to artificial change, officials now strive to preserve the park as it currently is.
“I don’t see anywhere near as many coins in pools as I used to back in my early days in the park,” Henry explained. “The bottoms of the more accessible springs used to be paved with coins, but now it’s pretty rare to see anything thrown into the pools.”
“I remember finding an old tire while cleaning Old Faithful one time,” he added. “Cleaning pools was done on a regular basis. It was like harvesting a crop. But values change, and they don’t clean the pools anymore, at least with the frequency and at the scale that we did.”
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