Deadly crash near Yellowstone highlights risks on scenic routes

The van collided with a pickup truck Thursday on a highway just west of Yellowstone. Both vehicles caught fire, and the survivors were taken to hospitals with injuries.

The deaths of at least six foreign nationals in a fiery van crash in eastern Idaho are a reminder that the visitors who throng to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks from around the world travel on scenic byways that can be as dangerous as the region’s grizzly bears and boiling hot pools.

The van collided with a pickup truck Thursday on a highway just west of Yellowstone. Both vehicles caught fire, and the survivors were taken to hospitals with injuries, according to police. The tourists who were killed were from Italy and China, officials said.

The Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco said eight Chinese citizens were injured in the crash. The accident comes after a crash in 2019 of a bus from Las Vegas carrying Chinese tourists that rolled over near southern Utah’s Bryce National Park, killing four people and injuring dozens more.

Where the van in Thursday’s accident was coming from and going was unknown. Some Yellowstone roads, including the one south of Old Faithful — the park’s most famous geyser — were still closed after the snowy winter.

The highway where the accident happened south of West Yellowstone, Montana, offers a way to get between Yellowstone and Grand Teton at this time of year, before a north-south route is plowed and the park fully opens for summer.

According to the most recent data from the International Trade Administration, 36 per cent  of international visitors who arrived to the U.S. by air listed visits to national parks and national monuments as their top leisure activity while in the U.S.

Seventeen percent of Yellowstone’s visitors came from other countries in 2016, according to a park visitor use study with the most recent comprehensive data available.

Visitors from Europe and Asia accounted for the majority of travelers from outside the U.S., with 34 per cent from China, 11 per cent from Italy and 10 per cent rom Canada.