WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Three friends were making their way home when a misstep caused them to fall into a pit of boiling water
An ordinary evening of fun took a dark twist as it became one of the most tragic accidents in Yellowstone National Park’s history.
Sara Hulpers, 20, and her two 18-year-old friends, Lance Buchi and Tyler Montague, were working as seasonal staff at the park in the summer of 2000 and were walking back home from swimming in the Firehole River with other friends that fateful day.
As they journeyed along their familiar route home, cutting through the Lower Geyser Basin and following a worn path used by locals with no official signage, they jumped into the small streams known to be safe.
Until the three of them misjudged one of the bodies of water. The friends believed they were jumping into a shallow freshet but instead plunged into the crust surrounding Cavern Springs, an off-limits feature known to reach temperatures as high as 87 degrees Celsius.
Lance and Tyler managed to keep their heads out of the water following the fall, and crawled out of the water on their own, while Sara had to be helped by the group of friends that was walking ahead of the trio, who had all returned after hearing their agonising cries.
In later reports, Lance’s family said he remembered feeling the ground beneath them was solid before he fell a second time while trying to escape the boiling water.
The damage was already catastrophic – the young woman had suffered third-degree burns all over her body, and heartbreakingly died the next day in a Salt Lake City burn unit.
The two surviving friends were airlifted to Idaho Falls and then to the University of Utah’s burn centre, both with burns ranging from 95% of their bodies. Their survival rate was low, but not impossible, said doctors, who estimated they had a 30-40% chance of making it through treatment, given the risks of infection since the boys had little uninjured skin left for grafting.
Tyler’s grandfather and former local weatherman, Bob Welti, was at the hospital at the early stages of treatment and called the situation the “saddest” he’d ever witnessed.
Both young men endured months of surgery and skin grafts before eventually being discharged, Tyler in November and Lance in December – the latter having lost 51 pounds during his hospital stay.
Hundreds gathered in Oroville, Washington, to mourn the loss of Sara, an exemplary student at Western Washington University, weeks away from a new scholarship award.
Friends who were by her side in the last days of her life spoke of her dedication while she was alive. Yuvia Storm, 21, was one of her friends from her time at Yellowstone, said: ”She was so happy. She told me I had to be the one to spread the word that she was excited about death. Tell them I had a wonderful life – no regrets.”
During the funeral service, her father sang songs he’d written about her, and friends and family decorated the auditorium with sunflowers.
Investigations followed, but found no evidence of alcohol as a leading factor in the tragedy, and officials added that it was the first Yellowstone hot spring fatality since 1988 – although since the time of this accident (in the year 2000), two further accidents took the lives of a 23-year-old in 2016 and a 70-year-old in 2022.
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