Workers pull 20,000 pieces of trash out of Yellowstone hot springs

Park workers spent the summer cleaning up thousands of items, including hundreds of lost hats, from Yellowstone's fragile hydrothermal areas.

Yellowstone National Park is famous for its beautiful hot springs and geysers. But this summer, park workers found something shocking in those areas: a massive amount of trash. Teams from the park and the U.S. Geological Survey worked to clean up these delicate spots. In total, they pulled out 20,000 pieces of garbage. It is easy for things to fall into the hot pools. Sometimes it happens by accident, but it is a big problem for the park. The trash hurts the natural environment and changes how the water flows in these sensitive areas. Among the thousands of items collected, one specific ob…