Toddler suffers burns after falling in Yellowstone thermal feature

Posted Friday, October 9, 2020 4:47 pm

A 3-year-old child suffered second-degree burns in Yellowstone National Park on Friday after falling into a thermal feature near Midway Geyser Basin. ... Park officials said the child "took off running from the trail, slipped and then fell into a small thermal feature" in the area of the Fountain Freight Road at 11:39 a.m.

The child was burned on its lower body and back, Yellowstone officials said in a Friday afternoon new release, and was taken by helicopter to the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center's Burn Center in Idaho Falls. WebMD describes second-degree burns as "partial thickness burns," which reach the lower layer of a person's skin and cause pain, redness, swelling and blistering. They are more serious than first-degree burns, but less severe than third- or fourth-degree burns.

Friday's incident was the second signfiicant injury reported at a Yellowstone thermal area this year. In May, a visitor who'd illegally entered the park fell into a thermal feature near Old Faithful while backing up to take a photo. Last year, a man similarly fell into thermal water and suffered severe burns while trespassing near the cone of Old Faithful.

The last fatality involving a Yellowstone thermal area came in June 2016, when a man left the boardwalk and slipped into a hot spring in the Norris Geyser Basin.

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