Yellowstone Has Pulled a Record Amount of Trash From Its Hot Springs This Year

It’s been a record-setting year at Yellowstone National Park — not for visitation, not for geological activity, but for how much stuff park staff have had to fish out of one of the world’s most irreplaceable natural landscapes.

By early October, the park’s geology team had removed 23,600 pieces of trash, 10,700 rocks and sticks, and 369 hats from Yellowstone’s geysers, hot springs, mud pots, and fumaroles — plus the boardwalks and trails surrounding them. That’s not including what’s been lost, submerged too deep to retrieve, or already done its damage.

The items range from the predictable to the genuinely baffling. Coins, sunglasses, water bottles. Also: five AirPods, six Invisalign retainers, rubber ducks, golf tees, junior ranger badges, fortune cookie fortunes, fake nails, floss picks, eight mini race cars, three Delta flight pins, a miniature copy of The Vampire Diaries, a McDonald’s toy from 2010, Polaroid photos, pacifiers, an inhaler, and a single Uno card.

The park’s geology team called the retainers, fake nails and floss picks among the ‘grossest’ finds of the season.

What This Is Actually Doing to the Pools

This isn’t just a litter problem. Trash in Yellowstone’s thermal features causes documented, sometimes permanent damage to some of the rarest ecosystems on Earth.

The chemistry of the pools is delicate. The vivid colors — the deep blues, oranges, greens, and yellows that make places like Grand Prismatic Spring internationally famous — come from specific communities of heat-adapted microorganisms called thermophiles. These microbes thrive in precise conditions of temperature, pH, and mineral content. When foreign objects enter the water, they alter those conditions. Microplastics leach chemicals. Objects block water flow. Temperature drops. Different microbes move in. The colors change.

Sometimes permanently.

Morning Glory Pool is the cautionary tale that Yellowstone staff cite repeatedly. Named for its once-brilliant blue color resembling the morning glory flower, the pool spent decades being treated like a wishing well. Visitors threw in coins, handkerchiefs, trash, and whatever else struck their fancy. The accumulated debris blocked the flow of hot water into the pool, lowering its temperature and allowing new microbial populations to establish themselves. The pool changed color. Rangers partially drained it in the 1970s and removed what they could. The blue never came back.

Most of It Is Probably Accidental

Here’s the part that shifts the story a little: park geologists say the majority of these objects probably weren’t thrown intentionally. Hats blow off heads. Phones and sunglasses drop from pockets. AirPods fall out of ears. Kids drop toys. Retainers fall out during sneezes or moments of awe. The single Uno card was presumably not someone’s act of vandalism.

That doesn’t make the cumulative damage less real, but it does mean the solution isn’t simply about cracking down on bad actors. The sheer volume of visitors — more than 4.5 million people came to Yellowstone in 2025 alone — means that even a tiny fraction of people losing things accidentally generates thousands of foreign objects in sensitive areas every season.

The geology team covers over 1,300 miles of trails and boardwalks on foot each season to collect what they find, on top of their actual scientific work monitoring the health of thermal features. It is, by any measure, a significant operational burden created almost entirely by visitor traffic.

What You Can Actually Do

Secure your hat before you lean over a hot spring. Put your phone in a pocket with a zipper. Don’t throw anything into the water — not coins for good luck, not rocks to see the splash, not anything. Stay on the boardwalks, which exist both to protect you from the dangerously thin crust around thermal features and to protect the features from foot traffic.

And if something does fall in — tell a ranger. Don’t try to retrieve it yourself. The water in Yellowstone’s hot springs can reach 189 degrees Fahrenheit. People have died trying to retrieve pets and belongings from thermal features. It is not retrievable by you, but it may be retrievable by the geology team.

The pools have been forming for thousands of years. The AirPods have been there for one summer. Only one of those things is going to change the chemistry.

Weather changes fast, so help your community stay prepared. Share this story with friends, family, or your group chat, and keep your forecast in the now with Weather Forecast Now.