Yellowstone rangers are investigating how a woman entered the park illegally and fell into a thermal feature near Old Faithful/Kurt Repanshek file

A woman who illegally ventured into Yellowstone National Park with hopes of photographing Old Faithful without throngs of milling tourists somehow stumbled into a thermal feature and sustained burns that required her to be helicoptered to a hospital.

The woman, whose name has not been released by park officials, was backing up to take a picture of the iconic geyser when she fell into a hot spring Tuesday morning, park spokesperson Morgan Warthin said Wednesday in an email. The woman then managed to drive nearly 50 miles north towards Mammoth Hot Springs before being stopped by a ranger, Warthin added.

"Due to her injuries, she was life-flighted to the Burn Center at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center," she said.

Yellowstone holds the world's greatest collection of thermal features, with some 10,000. The park enables safe viewing of hot springs, geysers, mudpots, and fumaroles through the use of boardwalks, defined trails, and patrolling rangers. Stray from a boardwalk or trail and you risk breaking through thin surface crusts rimming the features and being dropped into, or stumbling into, boiling, acidic waters.

The park has been closed to the public due to the coronavirus pandemic; exactly when it will reopen has not been announced.

Warthin had few answers to questions revolving around the incident, as it still was under investigation. It was not immediately known how the woman got into the park, whether she was alone, how much of her body was burned, the degree of burns, what thermal feature she fell into, whether she was a park employee or worker for a business operating in the park, or whether she was cited.

Back in 2016 an Oregon man walked far off the boardwalk in Yellowstone's Norris Geyser Basin and fell into an unnamed hot spring and was dissolved by the hot waters. Prior to that, the last known fatality related to one of the park's hot springs was in 2000, when three concessions workers fell into a thermal feature in the park's Lower Geyser Basin. Sara Hulphers, 22, of Washington state, received the most severe burns and died in a Salt Lake City hospital, park officials said at the time.

Back in September 2018 a man was arrested after leaving the boardwalk ringing Old Faithful and walking up to the geyser's cone.

“We take these cases very seriously,” said then-Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk. “The law requires people to stay on boardwalks or marked trails in thermal areas. Anyone who ignores this law risks their life and possibly the lives of emergency personnel.”

Park visitors die more often from falling into Yellowstone's thermal features than from grizzly bear attacks, according to long-time park historian Lee Whittlesey.

"...hot springs deaths have ocurred much more commonly in Yellowstone National Park than have grizzly bear deaths," Whittlesey wrote in his book, Death In Yellowstone, Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. "The park has around 10,000 hot springs, geysers, mudpots, and steam vents scattered over its mountain plateau. Though collectively called thermal features today, all are technically hot springs. Most are hotter than 150 degrees F and many reach temperatures of 185-205 degrees F."