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Drone goes down into famed Yellowstone National Park hot spring

Rangers are trying to find the drone in the depths of the 160-degree spring.

Drone goes down into famed Yellowstone National Park hot spring

Officials at Yellowstone National Park told reporters on Wednesday that a tourist had crashed a small drone into the iconic Grand Prismatic Spring last Saturday.

The incident marks the latest in a string of drone-related episodes in this region of Wyoming. A drone went down into Yellowstone Lake near the Grant Village Marina. Officials in nearby Grand Teton National Park have already issued one citation to a visitor for flying a drone within the park—it later got trapped in a tree and was then stolen, according to the Associated Press.

Yellowstone National Park did not immediately respond to Ars’ evening request for comment by phone or e-mail.

In June 2014, the National Park Service (NPS) banned the use of drones in all of its parks, following an initial ban in Yosemite National Park in California the previous month.

“We are beginning to get an increasing number of complaints from park visitors about people illegally flying these devices,” Park spokesman Al Nash told the Associated Press.

“Think of how many people are going to be on the boardwalk at Old Faithful on a given August afternoon. What might happen if someone even had one of these smaller devices and lost control of it over a big crowd?”

Nash told the Jackson Hole News & Guide that the agency would do its best to try find the missing drone and try to take it out—although at 160 feet down, in water at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, the chance of recovering anything useful is likely slim.

“We are trying to determine if we can locate it, and if we locate it, if we’ll be able to remove it,” Nash said. “Our concern is about any potential impacts to the iconic Yellowstone thermal feature.”

Ars has filed a public records request to determine how many such crashes have taken place and what actions the NPS has taken as a result.

UPDATE Thursday 11:34am CT:

Ars was able to finally reach park spokesman Al Nash, who said that the park received "eyewitness reports" of the drone crash on Saturday.

"We have some information regarding the operator but this incident remains under investigation. We haven’t been able to locate the unit in the spring. Grand Prismatic Spring is big, deep and hot. We are considering a manned helicopter flight to see if we can spot it from the air."

He also noted that the drone pilot could be issued "one or more citations."

"Operation of unmanned aircraft is prohibited, and it’s also against the rules to put foreign objects in thermal features—those are two right off the bat," he added.

"We have had ongoing issues for decades in Yellowstone with people treating our hot springs as if they were wishing wells," Nash continued. "The most common problem is people tossing coins. We have found a way to remove them. It depends on the given feature, typically we would use a tool from the boardwalk and one time we even had a boat that we put into these larger features. But foreign objects in our thermal features are not new, but this is certainly a very different wrinkle, and it presents a different challenge. I don't know any of the details of this device. Ultimately if we can find this device it begs the question: does it do more harm leaving it there or would our efforts to remove it do more harm? Until we can locate it we can’t really answer that question, but we know it’s there."

Channel Ars Technica