Yes, there’s that, but there was something specifically about temperature changes affecting the bacterial population. (I dimly recall the article being slanted towards global warming, but I am increasingly doubting my memory on this.)
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The Tivoli fountain in Rome is LOADED with Euros! That’s the fountain the song is about.
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Many years ago on some TV show I heard the story of a prank pulled by a couple of park employees. They stuck a large valve wheel in the ground near Old Faithful. Then when it was time for it to erupt one of them yelled “Let 'er rip!” and the other turned the wheel. He then turned it back as the geyser subsided because, you know, you don’t want to run up your utility bill more than necessary.
All my searches turn up reports that this is an urban legend, so the TV “reenactment” may have been the only time it happened.
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Hiking in mountains along the U.S.'s west coast, invariably the backwoods trails were clean of human refuse, but get within five miles of a trailhead or a parking lot, and the trail and surrounding areas were full of cigarette butts, trash bags, candy wrappers and so on.
At one time I was an optimist about humanity–we build neat things, we’ve gone into space, and we’ve created wonderful works of art, but the longer I’m on the planet it seems to me that we’re still stupid fucking animals who can hardly preserve our own cities, much less the wilds that (kinda) surround us.
Or how about we just throw the stupid bastards into the pool, naked, to retrieve the items they’ve thrown in?
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And the animals, they are even worse, they are crapping all over the forests!
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I was at Yellowstone a year-and-a-half ago and watched visitors cause damage to the Grand Prismatic Spring, dipping their hands in the pools, etc. The specific nationality of the visitors is irrelevant to this point, but they were clearly part of a tour group from abroad.
The park has a delicate line to walk. They could restrict access to some of these natural features to preserve them but then they risk less interest in the park generally (and potentially reduced funding). That said, for the entire time I was there the only time I saw a park ranger at a featured site was when I visited the Old Faithful geyser–the rest of the attractions could be fucked with as you please, which seems a shame.
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Optimists drive me crazy. Im told that there is something wrong with ME, just because I’m a realist (or pecimist, in their eyes).
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That might have been Candid Camera…like a lot of shows from the 40’s and 50’s. Some have been lost. They revived the show quite a few time tho.
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So where did you come from? I assumed the coin in water thing was kind of universal since it’s spread memetically by tourists (see also: padlocks in bridges). It’s done here in Brazil. And famously in Rome’s Trevi fountain, to assure you’ll return someday.
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I’m from England and it was never a thing there when I was growing up. Maybe we Brits are the unusual ones for not doing it?
Really? This was definitely a thing when I grew up in England.
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No you’re correct. It’s not actually the junk that causes the color change. It’s the change in the temperature caused, in part, by the lowered flow of hot water through the spring. Very misleading clickbait. Seismic changes and changes in the water table also had a large impact on the color changes. The color comes from the different bacterial colonies that grow in the springs. Change the temperature, and you change the color.
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But what do we send when they get stuck?
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Am I the only one here thinking that a dozen or so gallons of “Tidy Bowl” ought to bring that around?
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Man made wells and fountains get coins in the UK. I think natural pools get less. Here in NZ chucking coins into water is rife. 
Our local forests also have signs in multiple languages at the easy access points requesting that trampers refrain from smoking and touching the trees. But the bark is still being worn away near to the accessible paths which see traffic from bus tour groups. 
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People are tactile creatures, haptic communication is fairly important. That includes touching things and that includes trees.
If the amount of touched trees is a rounding error in the total numbers, I wouldn’t worry about them.
Grr. The ‘money trees’ meme annoys me, as a photo I posted to Flickr is usually reposted as evidence of a practice that’s been “going on for hundreds of years across the UK”.
Only… it hasn’t, and there are only a few instances. I’m very familiar with the tree in ‘your’ photo - it’s the same one I photographed. Not one of those coins is older than 1971 (when UK coinage changed), and the local explanation is that the ‘ancient tradition’ was started by school/university students visiting the nearby waterfalls.
The first reference I can find to these things being ‘wishing trees’ is post-2010, on tumblr/stumbleupon/pinterest, and the same 2-3 trees are shown every time.
And yes, a reason it hasn’t caught-on in our National Parks is that it’s generally considered vandalism.
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