Tanya Saueressig had to stop reading the comments shortly after her video of two women walking across Grand Prismatic Spring went viral.

“People saying things like, ‘They should have fallen in,’ ‘Darwin Awards,’ things like that,” Saueressig said, relaying the callousness of many comments.

Saueressig, a Livingston resident, says her intention when she recorded the video during her Saturday, July 18, visit to Yellowstone wasn’t to garner internet fame or to mock the women. That part of the park has no cell service, so instead of calling the ranger station or 911 to report the incident in real time, she filmed it to document what happened and report it later.

She also posted it to social media, hoping it would raise awareness about the fragility of the paper-thin bacterial mat the women walked across. She expected viewers to share her terror over the life-threatening risk, not to flood the comment section with racism because the two women were non-white.

She still hopes safety is the main takeaway, but said some of the vitriol in the responses has made her wonder whether the story’s viral reach has overshadowed what was actually at stake.

“Yes, they’re being dumb,” Saueressig said. “But they’re human beings, and nobody deserves to die like that.”

A YNP spokesperson told the Chronicle that the park is not aware of any reports made about the people in the video, and therefore no citations have yet been issued. The spokesperson added that visitors are prohibited from leaving boardwalks and designated trails in thermal areas, and urged anyone who witnesses this kind of behavior to tell a ranger or call 911.

Saueressig claims she submitted the video to the park’s online portal for non-emergency incidents the morning after filming it.

“I totally sent it to them,” Saueressig said. “I have not heard back.”

The park spokesperson declined to offer any further statement on the status of Saueressig’s report.

For Saueressig, the incident remains deeply unsettling. Besides the friend she’d come with, the only other person around when she spotted the women was a French tourist who spoke no English. Despite the language barrier, Saueressig said a mutual horror gripped all three of them.

“She was trying to gesture to her phone, and I could tell she’s like, ‘We can’t call,’” Saueressig said. “There was a united feeling of helplessness.”

Without cell service and too far away to yell out, they could only watch in disbelief as the women posed for photos on the prohibited ground.

“I immediately thought of the bison that had just fallen through last year,” Saueressig said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, we’re going to watch these people fall through the bacterial mat and die.’”

Eventually, the women stepped off the delicate crust and out of Saueressig’s sight, leaving her with no idea what became of them. All she has is the harrowing video.

“It’s hard for me to watch,” Saueressig said. “The fact that it didn’t fall through is nothing short of miraculous to me.”

As an avid Yellowstone visitor used to the summer tourist rush, Saueressig has seen others flirt with disaster. Just last month, while showing family members from out of town around the park, she filmed another close call when two hikers crossed over a safety railing to the edge of a cliff.

“It was a steep drop right behind her, and she was standing there posing and her friend was near her taking pictures,” Saueressig said. “There’s people standing around, and several people said, ‘What are you doing? Get back from there!’”

In her Livingston tattoo shop, Saueressig keeps a copy of the book “Death in Yellowstone” out for customers to flip through. She knows there simply aren’t enough rangers to cover the park’s vast area, and she hopes the book sends the same message she was trying to send when she shared the Grand Prismatic video on social media.

“You just don’t mess with nature,” Saueressig said. “You don’t poke the bear, literally. You don’t walk on the hot spring. There’s no mercy there. It does not care.”

But even the unforgiving reality of the wild hasn’t matched the cruelty that forced Saueressig to stop reading the comments. Nature, she said, can be deadly, but it operates without malice. She only wishes the internet could do the same.