Yellowstone National Park is a place where wildlife roams free, geysers shoot off, and all the horrors of the world melt away as you become enraptured by the serenity of the Earth’s wonders. And then a witless bison stumbles into an extremely hot spring and boils alive in front of the tourists, and suddenly the magic and majesty of the great outdoors is replaced with human and bison screams.
This past Saturday, a full-grown bison stumbled into the searing waters of the Grand Prismatic Spring and did not walk out. It happened in the Midway Geyser Basin, near Old Faithful. Tourists watched, powerless, as the bison reportedly got too close to the edge, lost its footing, and slipped into one of the park’s deadliest attractions.
According to Michael Poland, geophysicist and head of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, the bison likely thrashed briefly before landing in even hotter water. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that it likely died quickly, not from acid burns, but because the water was just so searing hot. Grand Prismatic runs about 192°F, and thanks to Yellowstone’s altitude, water boils at 200°F.
Bison Boils to Death in Yellowstone Hot Spring in Front of Tourists
Speaking with NBC News, Poland says Wildlife occasionally ventures too close to these geothermal pools, causing the thin crust surrounding them to collapse under their weight. Though they don’t always happen so out in the open in front of tourists at Yellowstone’s busiest tourist hotspot. It usually happens in some obscure backcountry hot spring where the animal can be liquefied in peace, not in front of out-of-towners watching you melt through a smartphone camera.
It all sounds pretty horrifying, unless you are a park visitor named Katie Hirtzel, who wrote on Facebook that she witnessed the whole thing happen and she somehow walked away from it being able to describe the experience of watching a bison boiled alive in a hot spring as “incredibly powerful and moving.” I would like to assume she used those words to describe the speed and ferocity with which she vomited at the sight, but I don’t think she is.