This is a sick twist on tiptoeing through the tulips.
Two idiots this week landed their helicopter in the middle of a field of California poppies in Southern California’s Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles. They began to hike through the wildflowers, part of a so-called “super bloom” that has mesmerized a huge swath of Southern California and drawn thousands of looky-loos to places such as Antelope Valley. Then they fled before authorities could nab them.
Given the laws of nature, once you have thousands of people doing something, you’ll have at least one of them doing something stupid. In this case it was two, which makes what they did twice as dumb.
“We never thought it would be explicitly necessary to state that it is illegal to land a helicopter in the middle of the fields and begin hiking off trail,” the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve said in a Facebook post along with the hashtag #Don’tDoomTheBloom, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We were wrong.”
Officers are watching for people illegally entering the park through barbed-wire fencing, trampling flowers. It only takes a few to wreck the habitat for years to come. There are areas in the Reserve that haven't recovered from trampling in 2017.#DontDoomTheBloom #CaStateParks pic.twitter.com/V3GcCE12ip
— Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve (@PoppyReserve) March 18, 2019
These folks weren’t, of course, the first people to do something idiotic in a place of beauty. Insider.com used a Reddit thread and other sources in 2017 to compile a list they called “The 17 dumbest things people have done in US national parks.” They include these:
“Four men tried to walk into the 160-degree geothermal hot springs in Yellowstone National Park.”
Four men with a travel-video site called High on Life were roundly criticized after they walked off the boardwalk area at Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring, a dumb thing to do for two reasons: The thermal spring’s water is about 160 degrees. And human footsteps can wreak havoc on this extremely delicate ecosystem.
“A woman graffitied her Instagram handle all over several National Parks.”
An Instagram “artist” named Casey Nocket was banned from all national parks for life, says Insider, “after graffiti of her Instagram handle was documented in seven different parks in 2014. She posted the images of her ‘tags on her own Instagram, so was understandably caught relatively quickly and plead guilty in 2016.”
And, of course, YouTube is chock full of real-life examples of foolish human behavior in our national parks.
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