Lucky They Didn't Get an Old Faceful

"Two seasonal Yellowstone National Park concessionaire employees have been fired after they were caught urinating into the iconic Old Faithful geyser." From OregonLive.

My first geology prof totally cracked me up with a story about getting banned from Yellowstone (which his wife swore was true). He and a buddy were on a trip out west, and their low tech alternative to locking the car was to take their steering wheel with them when they walked away. At Old Faithful, they found a broom handle, and waited a little apart from the growing crowd in anticipation of the imminent eruption of the geyser. The first stage of a geyser's eruption is gentle- easy to miss if you're not watching for it: a little gentle bubbling and a small surge of water out of the vent. This is thought to remove some of the pressure on the superheated column of water in the neck of the geyser, and leads to a runaway steam "explosion."

At any rate, when Dr. Niem and his buddy saw the splash of the beginng eruption, his buddy yelled "LET 'ER RIP!" and my prankish prof slapped the steering wheel on top of the broom stick, and started spinning it as fast as he could.

He and his friend were banned from the park for several years.

And nearly 30 years later, that story still gives me a chuckle.

Addendum- I guess this is the webcam that snared the offenders.