US

‘Gestapo tactics’: Yellowstone park rangers held tour group captive

Daily Caller News Foundation logo
Brendan Bordelon Contributor
Font Size:

A Yellowstone tour guide accused the National Park Service of using “Gestapo tactics” while shutting down the park, after armed rangers locked a group of terrified senior citizens inside their hotel for many hours to prevent them from visiting nearby attractions.

The Lawrence, Massachusetts Eagle-Tribune reports that the rangers also prevented the group from taking pictures of wildlife and from stopping at a rest facility during their departure, forcing seniors to wait well over two hours before using the restroom.

“We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Pat Vaillancourt, a Massachusetts resident who was on the tour last week. “It was like they brought out the armed forces.”

When the government shutdown took effect on October 1, Vaillancourt’s group of about four dozen senior citizens had just arrived at Yellowstone. Although many tourists were already being shuttled out of the park, rangers allowed the tour a two-day extension due to their prepaid hotel reservations. What looked like a generous exception, however, soon turned into a nightmare.

As the bus made its way into the park, the group stopped to take pictures of a large bison herd passing nearby. Vaillancourt said that a ranger quickly appeared, ordering the tourists to stop “recreating” and return to the bus.

When the group’s tour guide protested, the ranger became angry. “She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.

“We paid a lot to get in,” said tour guide Gordon Hodgson, who was interviewed by the local Livingston Enterprise. “All these people wanted to do was take some pictures.”

The seniors were sent to the Old Faithful Inn, a ritzy hotel located next to the famous Old Faithful geyser. Immediately upon their arrival, armed rangers locked the inn’s doors and stood guard outside to prevent the group from visiting the geyser, which was already barricaded.

“They looked like Hulk Hogans, armed,” Vaillancourt said. “They told us you can’t go outside. Some of the Asians who were on the tour said, ‘Oh my God, are we under arrest?’ They felt they were criminals.”

“All we could do was eat dinner in the dining room,” said Hodgson. “It was like a ghost town.”

On October 3, after many hours under quarantine inside the lodge, the senior citizens were piled onto a bus for the 2.5 hour ride out of the park. Although the tour guide had planned a brief stop to allow the seniors to comfortably use the restroom, threats by the park service to pull the facility’s operating license if they catered to tourists forced the group to wait until outside the park’s borders.

Hodgson blasted the park service for their “Gestapo tactics.”

“The national parks belong to the people,” he said. “This isn’t right.”

Park closures due to the shutdown have sparked a nationwide uproar, with many claiming that the park service is deliberately making the process difficult for political purposes. In a move reminiscent of the senior citizens’ ordeal in Yellowstone, a popular inn renting federal property in North Carolina was blocked by patrol cars, killing business during peak season and forcing 35 employees from their homes.

Vaillancourt said that many of the overseas visitors to Yellowstone were appalled by the park service’s thuggish behavior. “A lot of people who were foreign said they wouldn’t come back [to America],” she told the Eagle-Tribune.

Follow Brendan on Twitter

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel