Yellowstone Tourist Seen Dipping Hand Into Scalding Green Hot Spring

Yellowstone National Park is home to breathtaking hot springs like Green Dragon Spring and the famous Grand Prismatic Spring. But they're only pretty to look at, as the scalding acidic water is dangerous to touch. 

That didn't seem to bother two people visiting Green Dragon Spring recently. A park visitor captured the moment when they tried to get a closer look at the geothermal pond, with a shirtless man crouching and dipping his fingers in the scalding water. The photos were shared by the Instagram account TouronsOfYellowstone, which highlights the bad behavior of tourists in the national park. 

The pair would've had to go out of their way to get down to the spring, as visitors are told to stay on a boardwalk away from the water. The National Park Service says "visitors must wait patiently for a glimpse of the sulfur-lined cave and boiling green water." Needless to say, these guys weren't that patient. 

The NPS doesn't mince words about the real danger of Yellowstone's natural marvels. "Hot springs have injured or killed more people in Yellowstone than any other natural feature," the agency states plainly. 

Still, visitors don't seem to care about heeding those warnings and prefer to, for lack of a better term, fuck around and find out. The incident at Green Dragon Spring is only the latest in a string of tourists wandering off paths and touching the scalding water. Last month, a woman was seen dipping her hand into the steaming Silex Spring, and just a few days earlier, a man did the same thing at Upper Geyser Basin. 

You wouldn't put your hand in a boiling pot of water on the stove, so why would you do it in a body of water heated by Mother Nature herself?