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Posted by Paul (63.153.14.134) on 08:58:24 05/13/24
I stopped at Sheepeaters' Cliff the other day and watched a true display of Ugly Americans, or as they are known today---tourons. Several people were patiently waiting for the random but certain display of marmot, chipmunks, and pika from among the rock talus pile at the base off the cliff when the Ugly Americans arrived. The car literally vomited out husband and wife and three children 4,7,9 estimate age. With gay abandon the children brushed past the photographers and other nature lovers and assaulted the cliff. Scrambling over the rock debris at the base of the cliff they began their climb to the amusement and encouragement of the thinly disguised parents that dared, challenged, urged, and encouraged them to climb the cliff. Which they did as young children of tender aged that noisily and very clumsily scratched, clawed, jostled their way to the top, taunted by the oldest.
The marmot left, the pika went deep and the chipmunk scurried away. The photographers quietly left as did the elderly people just viewing nature. My companions, from Norway, were aghast. I confirmed that indeed these were the Ugly Americans also known as tourons. They asked, were there many in America. I acknowledged that their numbers are legion. And worse, they breed prodigiously.
Perhaps it is time to originate volunteers in YNP as they do in Tetons. Civilians with radios to patrol, observe, and report people, car license plates and photograph events. And perhaps it is time to ticket more aggressively than in the past. Members of this board surely remember the aggravation that befell Photodude years past for walking across Lamar Valley, a somewhat wide valley, to ostensibly photograph aspen. The truth will never be known, but by the time the case was dismissed it cost Photodude a great deal of money.
Perhaps. Or maybe, we just wait until a child falls and suffers injury and parents sue the Park to have the cliffs bulldozed flat.
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