Yellowstone National Park's geology team has taken more than 20,100 pieces of trash out of the park's thermal features so far this year, along with 5,600 rocks and sticks and over 280 hats -- a record for the program. The count was reported in the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory's weekly Caldera Chronicles column by Margery Price of the park's geology program. The debris gathers where the 4.5 million yearly visitors do: Midway Geyser Basin, home of Grand Prismatic Spring, and the ground around Old Faithful.
Anything foreign can damage a thermal feature or change it for good, by clogging its water supply, diverting its runoff channel or adding chemicals and sediment. Morning Glory Pool, in the Upper Geyser Basin, is the standing example: it changed colour last century because of what visitors threw in, and staff once drained part of it to get the trash back out. Coins do their own harm. Thrown in as if a hot spring were a wishing well, or dropped between boardwalk planks, they block vents and damage the bacterial and algal mats. Over $18 came out this summer, in pesos, yen and euros as well as US coins.
Little of the rest was thrown deliberately. Much of it went in off a boardwalk or was carried by the wind, which lifts tissues, maps and wrappers and, on a bad gust, sunglasses and hats. The frequent finds read like the contents of a pocket: 54 camera lens caps, 47 hair ties, 42 pencils, 36 pairs of sunglasses, 20 hotel key cards, 17 pacifiers. Stranger ones run to AirPods, golf tees, an inhaler, an Uno card and two rubber ducks. Removal falls to staff trained to move safely on thermal ground, on top of their monitoring work.
WHAT TAKES IT, this issue's cartridge, puts you on that boardwalk at Grand Prismatic for one shift. Six things are in the water, and the question is which head goes on your pole: a strainer reaches the near edge, a grabber the middle, a hook the far water, and the wrong one pushes the thing further out. The wind gusts on its own clock and drags whatever floats out of reach; whatever sinks drifts toward the vent, which keeps what it takes. Five of the six have to come out before the shift ends. Play it in the browser or download the .nes ROM.