Cheyenne, Wyo. – The death of at least six Italian and Chinese tourists in a Fiery van Crash in Idaho Near the Yellowstone National Park there is a reminder that the roads that lead to the popular international destination can be as dangerous as the brown bears of the region and the Hiraring pools.
The truck crashed with a truck on Thursday on a road west of Yellowstone. Both vehicles caught fire, and the survivors were taken to hospitals with injuries, according to the police. The tourists who were killed were from Italy and China, authorities said.
The General Consulate of the Chinese in San Francisco said that eight Chinese citizens were injured in the accident. The accident occurs after an accident in 2019 from a bus from Las Vegas. Carry Chinese tourists That turned near the Bryce National Park in South of Utah, killing four people and wounding more dozen.
Where the truck in the accident on Thursday came and worked was unknown. Some Yellowstone roads, including the south of Old Faithful, the most famous geyser in the park, were still closed after snowy winter.
The road where the accident occurred to the south of West Yellowstone, Montana, offers a way to get between Yellowstone and Grand Teton at this time of the year, before a northern-south route is squeezed and the park opens completely for the summer.
According to the most recent data in international trade administration, 36% of international visitors who arrived at the US
The seventeenth percent of Yellowstone visitors came from other countries in 2016, according to a study of park visitors with the most recent integral data available.
Visitors from Europe and Asia represented most travelers from outside the United States, with 34% of China, 11% of Italy and 10% of Canada.
The Covid-19 pandemic changed those numbers significantly, said Brian Riley, whose Wyoming Business, Old Hand Holdings, markets the Yellowstone region in China and tours.
“All Chinese are taught how big Yellowstone is in their primary school,” Riley said Friday.
Pandemia put an acute brake on tourism of all kinds, but especially from China, which has not yet recovered, Riley observed. Now, the visits of people who already live in the United States take into account most of the Chinese visits, he said.
“Foreigners in general do not feel safe here as they did before,” Riley said Friday. “The Chinese are preaching that behind the scene.”
The US tourism industry expected 2025 to be another good year for foreign visitors. But several months later, international arrivals They have been chopped. Angry by President Donald Trump’s duty and rhetoricand alarmed by tourist reports that Arrested on the borderSome citizens from other countries remain away from the United States and choose to travel to another place.
Riley, who grew up in Jackson, Wyoming, just south of Grand Teton and lived in China for a while to learn Mandarin and why the Chinese wanted to visit the United States, is more concentrated in recent times to visit Hawaii, a state perceived as less dangerous.
Yellowstone crowds reach their maximum point in the summer, but international tourism reaches its maximum point in spring and autumn, according to Riley and the mayor of West Yellowstone, Jeff McBirnie.
Many foreign visitors are parents of international students from American schools and universities.
“They are like, ‘Hey, let’s leave our child and go on vacation for a week’. Or graduate for children, we will go through the university and go on vacation,” said McBirnie, owner of a pizzeria in the city. “They really contribute a great economic impact to this city.”
Yellowstone suffered a blow of one between Pandemia and devastating floods In 2022, that cut access to parts of the park for months.
Tourism recovered with 4.7 million visitors last year, the most or less registered second from Yellowstone.
Sinuous roads and natural distractions help feed numerous accidents in the park and its surroundings.
The first death that involved a passenger vehicle in Yellowstone occurred only a few years after the park was completely motorized and a bus fleet replaced coaches and horses used for transport in the first years of the park.
In 1921, a 10 passenger bus left the road in the park’s fishing bridge area and lowered a embankment, killing a 38 -year -old Texas woman when her neck broke, according to the historian of the Lee Whittlesey Park.
Whittley in his book “Deaths in Yellowstone”. The deaths of the chronicles by all media, from drowning in hot springs, to carry maulings, accidents of airplanes and murders. The automotive deaths, Whittley wrote, are “legion” in the park, to the point that he felt them too ordinary to include in their deaths.
Another accounting of Deaths in Yellowstone He says that at least 17 people died inside the park in car accidents since 2007, classifying it as the second most common cause of deaths behind medical problems.
Whittlesey foreshadowed the chapter of his book that covers road deaths with an appointment attributed to the mother of the fifteenth century Mother Shipton: “Carriages without horses will leave, and accidents fill the world of misfortune.”
___
Brown reported from Billings, Montana.
