Camera lens caps. Sunglasses. AirPods. Hot Wheels. Pokémon cards. Godzilla.
Those are some of the 20,100 pieces of trash the National Park Service recovered from hot springs and thermal areas in Yellowstone National Park this summer.
The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory shared details on the human debris Yellowstone staff have retrieved from thermal areas over the summer season. As usual, it was a smorgasbord of items ranging from the expected to the bizarre.
The most common item was hats. More than 280 were collected, including a FIFA 2026 Men’s World Cup hat.
Any rewearable hats will be washed and donated to local organizations.
Yellowstone staff also collected a whopping $18 in international currency. Entry for international visitors might have been raised to $100 per individual, but plenty of euros, pesos, and Canadian dollars were still found in the park.
And the strangest items? According to Yellowstone staff, their picks were Polaroid pictures of people posing next to Yellowstone's thermal features and a two-inch copy of The Vampire Diaries.
