A new video filmed in Yellowstone National Park is a good reminder to slow down in national parks. Besides taking time to enjoy the scenery, visitors should be aware of other vehicles and wildlife.
Videos by Outdoors
A recent visitor to Yellowstone captured this video while vehicles were pulled over:
In the clip from Ruby Hour Photo Art, you can see multiple vehicles pulled over with passengers out of their cars filming something. Then you hear the rev of an engine, and a fast moving white SUV enters the frame. Seconds later, a black wolf darts across the road with the SUV driver slamming on their brakes.
While it’s hard to know if the driver was actually speeding or not, it was still a close call for the threatened species.
The poster of the video says, “I posted this before as a cautionary tale about driving carefully in Yellowstone. Many thought this was someone’s dog because it has a collar. Certainly not a dog – this is a black wolf in Yellowstone’s Hayden Valley.”
Driving Safety in National Parks
Unsafe driving is a big issue in national parks. According to the National Park Service (NPS), motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of “unintentional fatalities” in national parks. One person is killed a week on an NPS regulated roadway. And that’s just the start of vehicle-related issues at NPS sites.
The NPS says another problem with speeding in parks is that many of the roads are historic and designed to enhance your experience. That means roads are narrow, curves could be steep, and speed limits are intentionally low.
As seen in this video, another danger of unsafe driving is putting wildlife at risk. The number of collisions involving wildlife inside a park is twice the national average.
But not all the issues have to do with speeding. Sometimes bad habits, like feeding wildlife from a car, also create problems. Not only is human food harmful for animals, but feeding from a car encourages animals to hang out near roads in search of food. This increases the risk of a collision.
So remember, slow down and enjoy the outdoors.
