The bison are not your friends.
Let me be more specific: those thousand-pound mammals with horns and an attitude problem have gored 56 people in Yellowstone since 1980, which means roughly two visitors per year learn this lesson the hard way. They’ve killed five. Meanwhile, bears—the creatures everyone obsesses over with their bear spray and anxious glances—have killed eight people in the park’s entire 153-year history. Do the math. The fuzzy cows are winning.
When Geysers Stop Being Instagram Props and Start Being Actual Threats
Here’s the thing about thermal features: they’re literally holes in the ground filled with water that could poach you like an egg. Since 1870, at least 22 people have died in Yellowstone’s hot springs. In 2016, a 23-year-old man dissolved—completely dissolved—in Norris Geyser Basin after leaving the boardwalk to check the water temperature. The acidity was comparable to battery acid, the temperature around 199 degrees Fahrenheit.
The park spans 2.2 million acres, contains more than 10,000 thermal features, and people still think boardwalks are suggestions rather than survival equipment.
Wait—maybe the problem is that these deadly pools look utterly gorgeous. Morning Glory Pool, with its brilliant blue center fading to yellow and orange edges, resembles a celestial eyeball more than a death trap. Except tourists have thrown so much garbage into it over the decades that it’s actually cooled down and changed color. The bacteria shifted. The chemistry transformed. It’s now less blue, more greenish, because people couldn’t resist tossing in coins and trash like it was a wishing well.
Turns out treating geothermal features like fountains at the mall has consequences nobody anticipated.
The Wildlife Photography Industrial Complex Wants You Dead
Every summer, Yellowstone becomes a theater of terrible decisions. People approach elk during rutting season—when males are territorial, aggressive, and equipped with antlers that could impale a small car. They chase bear cubs for photos while mama bear watches from thirty feet away, calculating trajectories. In 2015, five bison-related injuries occured in just one month, prompting the park to issue statements that essentially said: “Seriously, stop it.”
The National Park Service recommends staying 25 yards from bison and elk, 100 yards from bears and wolves. These aren’t arbitrary numbers pulled from regulatory imagination—they’re based on decades of watching human stupidity collide with animal instinct. A bison can run three times faster than you. They can pivot with shocking agility for something that resembles a hairy refrigerator on legs.
But social media demands content, and content demands proximity, and proximity demands medical evacuations.
When the Ground Beneath Your Feet Is Literally a Volcanic Time Bomb (But Don’t Panic Yet)
The Yellowstone Caldera—that massive volcanic system lurking beneath the park—last erupted 640,000 years ago. It’s overdue by exactly zero years, because volcanoes don’t follow schedules, despite what disaster movies suggest. The United States Geological Survey monitors it constantly with seismometers, GPS stations, and satellite measurements. They’ve detected ground deformation, earthquake swarms, and hydrothermal changes that would terrify anyone who doesn’t understand volcanic systems operate on geological timescales.
Translation: you’re not going to die in a supervolcano eruption during your long weekend at Old Faithful.
You might, however, die from driving. Vehicle accidents have killed more people in Yellowstone than any other cause—way more than bears, bison, or boiling water combined. The roads wind through mountains with minimal guardrails, wildlife crosses without checking for traffic, and tourists stop their cars in the middle of highways to photograph animals, creating what park rangers call “bear jams” or “bison jams” depending on the species causing the blockage.
In 2004, a woman died after her car collided with a bison at night. The bison, predictably, survived.
The real danger at Yellowstone isn’t nature—it’s the persistent human belief that rules don’t apply to us personally. That thermal features make exceptions for careful people. That wild animals understand we just want a quick photo. That boardwalks and warning signs exist for other, less competent visitors. This cognitive dissonance has been fatal exactly 350 times since the park opened in 1872, which averages out to about two deaths per year, though some years are considerably worse than others.
Stay on the boardwalks. Keep your distance from anything with fur, horns, antlers, or claws. Don’t pet the bison. Don’t test the water temperature with your hand. Don’t assume that because something is beautiful, it’s also safe.
Nature doesn’t care about your Instagram follower count.
