6 Mistakes To Avoid In Yellowstone

Above, trying to pet a "fluffy cow" like this one is not a good idea. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

In recent years, a new word has been coined that combines the words tourist and moron. It us touron.

A touron is someone who does something stupid in places like Yellowstone National Park such as trying to pet a "fluffy cow" (i.e., a bison) and getting gored.

With the above in mind, Travel + Leisure has an article on six mistakes to avoid in Yellowstone National Park. 

They begin it with:

My California cousins may have taken their first steps at Disneyland, but growing up in Montana, my family’s go-to “theme park” was Yellowstone National Park — where the theme wasn’t Mickey Mouse but rather Mother Nature.

Thirty years later, my home base is still just an hour from the Beartooth Pass, which leads to Yellowstone’s northeast entrance. As both a local and regular parkgoer, a part of me dies inside every time I read about a Yellowstone “touron” — a term now in our vernacular thanks to the trending Instagram account — doing something dumb. Most headlines, like June’s “Bison gores 83-year-old woman in Yellowstone National Park,” involve tourists getting too close to wildlife, but touron offenses run the gamut. In May, someone filed a complaint about a “lack of trained Grizzlies.” Just a month earlier, a car full of visitors got stuck in snow for six hours after ignoring road closed signs. And last August, several tourists stuck their hands in a hot spring. Fortunately, it wasn’t the same one that “dissolved” a man in 2016.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want people to stop visiting Yellowstone, and I certainly don’t want to be giving hall monitor energy. I just want us to respect the environment and ourselves while enjoying the world’s first national park. For that reason, below are a few "don’ts" that I hope you find helpful, whether it’s your first or 15th time driving through the Roosevelt Arch. It’s not an exhaustive list (see here for the motherlode of park rules and regulations), but it’s a good start. And remember, in the wise words of Jellystone’s lovable Yogi, be “smarter than the average bear.”

To read more, go here.