One Tourist’s Reckless Move in Yellowstone Caused a Massive Traffic Jam for Everyone Else

Picture driving your car along the roadside lane near Lamar Valley, Hayden Valley, Tower Falls, or Bear-muda Triangle in Yellowstone National Park. You see tourists milling and tooling around, with cameras and binoculars strapped to their shoulders, water bottles dangling from children's necks, and trash bins overflowing with granola bar wrappers. Suddenly, you sense a mammoth shadow flit past your car. A cinnamon-colored grizzly bear! The bear seems to be digging up roots and eating berries to fatten up in the summer.

At a distance, her fellow grizzly is ripping a dead deer’s carcass. So, you pull the brakes and stop the car to behold these gigantic creatures. At first, there’s just one car on the road. Then a second one draws up, then another, and so on. Within a few minutes, the lane becomes a snake gridlocked with parked cars, stretching across the park like a giant toy train. A sight like this is not uncommon in Yellowstone.

However, each time this happens and the roads get concentrated with vehicles, it becomes challenging for the bears to navigate their surroundings. In turn, they become aggressive, which poses a risk to the visitors as well. The traffic jam prompts newcomers to feel agitated and exhausted even before stepping on the park’s grounds to enjoy its beauty. Calling out one such visitor, Instagrammer TouronsOfYellowstone (@touronsofyellowstone) shared footage of a traffic jam spawned by a female visitor, which triggered unrest among the tourists present there.

The footage opens into a lane in Yellowstone National Park. Likely recorded by a frustrated visitor, the video shows a grey road undulating between the groves of towering pine trees, jutting in thick boughs from the valleys on the sides. From the camera’s point of view, the road seems to be busy with traffic generated by vehicles, both coming and going. Some people appear to be getting out of their cars to see what was happening. As it turned out, the miles-long traffic jam was caused by a visiting woman.

Unbeknownst to the consequences, the woman had parked her big white car on the side of the lane, in the middle of the road, all to see a little bear from a distance. Like a corkscrew, her static car plugged the cars coming behind into a full stop, which backed up traffic, creating a long queue of vehicles to jam the entire road. The videographer filmed the long lane of vehicles while driving from the opposite lane. The traffic appeared to be stretching for at least a mile, choking the entire territory with noise. “Do not leave your car in the middle of the road while you go off to look at animals," the Instagrammer warned in the caption, urging park visitors not to be “selfish.”

They attributed the original footage and the message to @emmarichwine_. “Find a pull off or pull over, making sure you are off the road completely. If there is nowhere to park or pull over, then move it along.  Leaving your car in the middle of the road means that traffic backs up and others have to wait for you,” the caption said.

The footage prompted a flurry of aggrieved reactions from viewers, many of whom were outraged by this traffic jam problem in Yellowstone. “I would have jumped in the car and driven away and not look back,” commented @bigkev_96118. @16incutthroat said, “A regular occurrence in Yellowstone, some are so entitled.” @gross.ron added, “Someone should have gotten in it and moved it or driven it to the rangers station. Tell them it was abandoned.” Raving on the issue, @elljahs_omi suggested that, “they had more people controlling the roads and fine these folks.”

You can follow TouronsOfYellowstone (@touronsofyellowstone) on Instagram for little-big episodes unfolding in Yellowstone.