A National Park's Plea: Enjoy the Animals; Don't Act Like One

The New York Times: Does a bear poop in the woods? Of course it does, and so, apparently, do a whole lot of humans.

Discarded toilet paper is just one of the problems that Rocky Mountain National Park has been dealing with as it leapfrogged ahead of Yellowstone and Yosemite in popularity last year. Its 4.16 million visitors in 2015, an increase of 21 percent from the year before, is behind only Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with 10.71 million guests, and Grand Canyon National Park, with 5.52 million.

“With that increase, we started to see a different behavior in our visitors,” said Kyle Patterson, a Rocky Mountain National Park spokeswoman.

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