Yellowstone visitor dips hand in hot spring

Too hot to handle!

A hapless visitor to Yellowstone National Park’s world-famous hot springs got a thermal surprise after dunking her hand in the spring’s steaming-hot waters.

In a video that has gone viral, a man and a woman defy legal restrictions and common sense when they dismount a park boardwalk at Silex Spring on the Fountain Paint Pot Nature Trail in Wyoming.

The pair then scurry down a grassy embankment and approach the 174-degree hydrothermal pool.

“Stupid,” the man recording the video remarks.

The woman rolls up her sleeves, crouches on the ground at the edge of the spring and then gingerly dips the digits of her right hand and the tip of her shoe into the scalding water, while grasping her companion’s hand with her left hand.

She then quickly scrambles to her feet and runs back towards the wooden boardwalk, yelling, “It’s hot! It’s very hot!” drawing chuckles from onlookers.

The Instagram post includes a quote from the person who took the video, recounting a brief conversation he said he had with the man in the video just before the incident.

“I told him that was a bad idea and they shouldn’t get off the boardwalk,” the Instagram user is quoted as saying. “His response was ‘whatever man.’”

The eyewitness said that he would have reported the visitors’ antics to the authorities, but there was no park ranger around at the time.

Visitors to Yellowstone National Park are strictly prohibited from touching, swimming or soaking in hot springs.

“Water in hot springs can cause severe or fatal burns, and scalding water underlies most of the thin, breakable crust around hot springs,” the National Park Service’s Yellowstone safety page warns.

More than 20 people have died from burns suffered after they entered or fell into Yellowstone’s hot springs, according to the agency.

The Instagram video is now under investigation, officials with Yellowstone National Park told the news outlet Buckrail.

Last summer, a human foot in a shoe was found floating in Yellowstone’s Abyss Pool, the park’s 53-foot-deep hot spring that reaches 140 degrees.

In 2016, a visitor may have died and completely dissolved after soaking in another scalding Yellowstone hot spring. No remains were ever recovered.