Man Completely Dissolved After Falling Into Boiling, Acidic Hot Spring

A man who died after falling into a scalding Yellowstone National Park hot spring, dissolved completely in the acidic waters.

Colin Nathaniel Scott, 23, of Portland, OR, fell into the hot spring in the Norris Geyser Basin after wandering away from a designated boardwalk in the company of his sister.


His sister, Sable Scott, told investigators that she and her brother walked several hundred feet up a hill in search of “a place that they could potentially get into and soak,” Deputy Chief Ranger Lorant Veress told KULR-TV in an interview.

According to a National Park Service incident record first reported by KULR, as Sable took video of her brother with her mobile phone, he reached down to check the water temperature and slipped and fell into a thermal pool about 6 feet long, 4 feet wide and 10 feet deep.

Park officials did not release the video or a description of it, but the report said it also chronicled Sable efforts to rescue her brother.

Search and rescue rangers spotted Colin body floating in the pool the day of the accident, but a lightning storm prevented recovery, the report stated.

The next day, workers could not find any remains in the boiling, acidic water.

“In very short order, there was a significant amount of dissolving,” Veress said.

Veress described the area where the incident occurred as extremely dangerous.

“There’s a closure in place to keep people from doing that for their own safety and also to protect the resources because they are very fragile.  But, most importantly for the safety of people because it’s a very unforgiving environment,” Veress said

The report included images of several signs warning people of the dangers of the park’s geothermal features and of traveling off walkways in the area where Colin Scott died.

The National Park Service did not issue any citations in the case.

Scott was on a college graduation trip with his sister at the time of his death, which came a day after six people were cited for walking off-trail at the park’s Grand Prismatic Spring.

At least 22 people are known to have died from hot spring-related injuries in and around Yellowstone since 1890, park officials said.

The geothermal ponds, pools, and geysers at Yellowstone average around 93°C (199°F) at the surface, and they are far hotter just a few meters down and these springs are only habitable to a select bunch of organisms known as archaea.

A week later, a tourist from China was fined $1,000 for breaking through the fragile crust in the Mammoth Hot Springs area, apparently to collect water for medicinal purposes.