7 dead after tour van crash outside Yellowstone National Park
A fiery collision between a pickup and a tour van left seven people dead in eastern Idaho near Yellowstone National Park on Thursday evening, according to Idaho State Police.
Six of those killed were riding in a Mercedes passenger van, which was operating as a tour vehicle carrying 14 people. The driver of the Dodge Ram pickup, its sole occupant, was also killed. He was identified Friday as 25-year-old Isaih Moreno, of Humble, Texas, according to Idaho State Police spokesman Aaron Snell.
The crash happened just before 7:15 p.m. on U.S. Highway 20 near Henry’s Lake, a two-lane road that is part of a state park and recreation area about 15 miles west of Yellowstone, state police said. The pickup truck was traveling westbound while the van was traveling eastbound, Snell said in a statement Friday. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
It will “take time” to identify the other crash victims because of what Snell called the “complexity of the incident.” Both vehicles caught fire after the crash.
The collision snarled traffic and shut down Highway 20 in both directions for seven hours overnight, police said. Three passengers were airlifted to hospitals in Bozeman and Idaho Falls. The remaining survivors were taken to area hospitals by ambulance with injuries that are not expected to be life-threatening, police said.
Roger Merrill, 60, came upon the scene just minutes after the crash, as he was driving from his nearby summer home, he told the Washington Post on Friday. He saw several vehicles stopped on the side of the road as motorists tried to help the injured passengers, before the wreckage caught fire.
“It was obvious that it was catastrophic,” Merrill said.
He saw several passengers who had evacuated the van talking to travelers who had stopped to help. One carload of people had pulled over and offered blankets to warm several crash survivors as they awaited first responders on the remote stretch of highway, Merrill said.
About 15 minutes after he arrived, Merrill said, the vehicles caught on fire. As he captured the blaze on video, smoke billowed off the crash as the vehicles became fully engulfed, he said. He wasn’t sure if passengers were still trapped in the van.
Around that time, sheriff’s deputies arrived and approached the crash with a fire extinguisher, he said.
The highway is a main corridor to Yellowstone National Park, seeing as many as 9,000 vehicles per day, according to the Idaho Transportation Department.
“Since 2020, there have been two fatal crashes near the Idaho and Montana state line,” said Bryan Young, the Idaho Transportation Department traffic and operations engineering manager. “As we do with every fatal crash, we will be meeting with our law enforcement partners to see what, if anything, could be changed to make the roadway safer, factoring in crash data.”
The condition of the surviving passengers was not immediately known Friday afternoon. Idaho State Police said it was still notifying families of the deceased.