DNA testing has determined that a foot found floating in Abyss Pool belonged to a Los Angeles man/Kurt Repanshek file
DNA testing identified a partial foot found floating in a Yellowstone National Park hot spring this past summer as that of a 70-year-old California man, park officials announced Thursday.
The foot belonged to Il Hun Ro, of Los Angeles, a park release said. Yellowstone law enforcement officers received the positive identification based on DNA analysis in the last three weeks and notified the family.
The foot in a shoe was discovered floating in Abyss Pool in the West Thumb Geyser Basin on August 16. Park investigators later said they believed an individual fell into the pool, which has a temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the morning of July 31.
The ensuing investigation determined, to the best of investigators' knowledge, that there was an unwitnessed incident at the hot spring involving one individual. No foul play occurred. Based on a lack of evidence, the circumstances surrounding the death of Ro remain unknown, the release added.
This investigation has concluded, and the park has no additional information to share.
The Norris Geyser Basin is the most colorful in Yellowstone/NPS, Jim Peaco
As beautiful as the park's thermal features are, they're extremely dangerous due to their high temperatures. Back in June 2016 an Oregon man who wanted to see just how hot one feature in the Norris Geyser Basin was died when he fell into a spring with a temperature of nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
Colin Nathaniel Scott, 23, and his sister, Sable, had wandered nearly 700 feet off a boardwalk in the Back Basin of the Norris Geyser Basin that June. Not far from Porkchop Geyser, a thermal feature that once simmered as a hot spring before launching into a continuous series of surging spouts in 1985, the two neared a small, unnamed hot spring.
"As he approached the hot spring, we had heard that he was going to, or was attempting to, dip his toe into the hot spring, and he slipped or fell into it," Yellowstone spokeswoman Morgan Warthin told the Traveler at the time. "With regards to the hot spring itself ... the subsurface temperatures in the spring are super-heated, and it has a pH of close to 4. What that means is that it has a very high acidity.”
Yellowstone can be a wild and dangerous place. While grizzly bears certainly pose a threat to backcountry travelers who aren't careful, and bison and elk pose a front-country threat, "...hot springs deaths have ocurred much more commonly in Yellowstone National Park than have grizzly bear deaths," Yellowstone historian Lee Whittlesey wrote in his book, Death In Yellowstone, Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park.
More recently, a Washington state woman received extreme burns to much of her body in October 2021 when she jumped into a spring to save her dog. The 20-year-old was traveling with her dog and her father when they stopped in the vicinity of Fountain Flat Drive south of Madison Junction. When they got out of their vehicle to look around, the dog jumped out of the car and into Maiden's Grave Spring, a simmering spring named for the nearby grave of Mattie Culver, who died in 1889 during childbirth at the Marshall Hotel that once stood in the area.
The father pulled his daughter out of the spring and drove her to West Yellowstone, Montana, for treatment.
Last September at Old Faithful a 19-year-old park concessions employee from Rhode Island suffered second- and third-degree burns to 5 percent of her body after stumbling into a thermal feature.
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