Carl McDaniel was walking through Bridge Bay Campground in Yellowstone National Park on July 10, 2026, when a bison launched him eight feet into the air. He landed hard, suffering multiple fractures that sent him to Bozeman Health Deaconess Medical Center. The attack was the third documented bison injury in or near Yellowstone in roughly a year, adding to a pattern that park officials say is driven almost entirely by visitors getting too close to animals that can weigh 2,000 pounds and sprint at 35 miles per hour.
Three bison injuries in 13 months at Yellowstone
The sequence of attacks is tightly clustered. A man was gored in Yellowstone on June 10, 2025. Then, on June 26, 2026, a 12-year-old was injured near Mud Volcano. Two weeks later, McDaniel was tossed at Bridge Bay. Each incident followed the same basic script: a person on foot was within striking distance of a bison that charged without extended warning.
Bridge Bay Campground sits near Yellowstone Lake, and bison are frequent visitors to the campground. That proximity means campers regularly encounter animals weighing a ton or more while walking between tents, picnic tables, and restrooms. Unlike visitors who spot bison from a car along the park’s main loop road, people at Bridge Bay are often on foot with no barrier between them and wildlife. The distinction matters: someone inside a vehicle or hard-sided RV has a physical shield and can simply wait for an animal to pass. A person standing in a campsite does not.
Park safety materials state plainly that bison injure more people in Yellowstone than any other animal. That includes bears, which receive far more public attention and generate stricter food-storage rules. Bison attacks tend to produce blunt-force trauma, broken bones, and goring wounds rather than the bite and claw injuries associated with bear encounters, but the frequency is higher. For visitors, the risk is less about predatory intent and more about sheer size, speed, and the unpredictability of wild animals that often appear placid until they are not.
Why the 25-yard rule keeps failing in practice
The National Park Service requires visitors to stay at least 25 yards from bison and other large animals. That is roughly the length of two school buses parked end to end. In open meadows along the road, the rule is relatively easy to follow. In a campground, where animals wander between parked cars and tent pads, 25 yards can evaporate in seconds as a grazing bison closes the distance or a person unknowingly walks into its path.
NPS educational materials have documented a specific behavioral trigger: visitors approaching bison for photographs or selfies. Those encounters have resulted in people being tossed into the air and gored. A bison that appears calm while grazing can charge with almost no visible buildup. The animal lowers its head, accelerates in a few strides, and uses its massive skull and horns to lift or throw the target. McDaniel recorded a video from his hospital bed at Bozeman Health Deaconess Medical Center, telling the Associated Press that hitting the ground was the worst part, emphasizing that the impact, not the horn contact, caused most of his injuries.
The gap between the rule and actual visitor behavior is where injuries happen. Campground settings complicate compliance because bison move through shared spaces where people cook, sleep, and store gear. A visitor who steps out of an RV to check a cooler may find a bison 15 yards away with no obvious escape route. Families with small children may be especially vulnerable if kids run or shout, behaviors that can draw an animal’s attention. In those moments, the 25-yard buffer is less a guideline than an already-broken standard, and split-second decisions determine whether someone is hurt.
The NPS has not published incident-level data that codes whether victims were on foot versus inside a vehicle or structure at the time of contact. That kind of granular breakdown would allow researchers and park managers to measure whether campground-specific interventions, such as hard-sided shelter requirements or temporary closures during bison migration, reduce injury rates. Without it, managers must rely on broader patterns and anecdotal accounts from rangers and medical staff who respond to these scenes.
What Yellowstone’s bison injury record still does not show
Official NPS news releases for bison incidents typically include the victim’s age, home state, general location, and time of day. They do not include the measured distance between the victim and the animal at the moment of the charge, nor do they reference video or photographic evidence from the encounter itself. For the July 10 Bridge Bay incident, no primary NPS news release has been published; the victim’s name, specific injuries, and hospital details come from secondary reporting by the Associated Press and local outlets rather than from Yellowstone’s public affairs office.
That reporting gap limits what the public can learn from each event. Without standardized data on victim position (on foot, in a tent, near a vehicle), animal behavior before the charge, and exact distances, each incident reads as an isolated story rather than a data point in a trackable pattern. The NPS collects internal incident reports, but those records are not routinely published in a format that allows outside analysis of campground-specific risk. As a result, journalists and safety advocates must infer trends from a small number of summarized press releases and occasional interviews with survivors.
More detailed, anonymized case summaries could help clarify whether particular layouts-such as campsites that back directly onto meadows or game trails-correlate with higher odds of close encounters. They could also show whether most victims were trying to approach animals or were surprised at short range, a distinction that matters for designing effective warnings. If, for instance, the bulk of injuries occur when sleeping campers exit tents at dawn and find bison already in the site, managers might prioritize early-morning patrols or temporary area closures over general messaging about selfies.
Balancing access, wildlife, and safety
Yellowstone’s managers face a familiar tension: the park exists to protect wildlife and landscapes while also providing for public enjoyment. Bison are an emblem of the park, and for many visitors, seeing them up close is a primary reason to come. Closing entire campgrounds for long stretches or fencing off large areas would reduce the very experiences that draw people to Yellowstone in the first place.
At the same time, the cluster of recent injuries underscores that current strategies-signs, brochures, and occasional ranger talks-are not fully bridging the gap between rules and real-world behavior. Some safety experts have suggested more conspicuous visual cues in high-risk zones, such as painted buffer rings around common bison travel corridors in campgrounds or larger, graphic warning signs at trailheads and registration kiosks. Others argue for stronger consequences, including fines for people documented approaching wildlife too closely, paired with clear public reporting of enforcement actions to reinforce the message.
For now, the burden falls largely on individual visitors to internalize that a bison is not a slow, placid cow but a powerful wild animal capable of closing 25 yards in less than two seconds. In places like Bridge Bay, where the line between human space and wildlife habitat is little more than a tent wall, that understanding can be the difference between a memorable photograph and a medevac flight. Until Yellowstone’s public record on bison incidents becomes more detailed and systematic, each painful story-like McDaniel’s flight through the air-will stand in for the data the park does not yet share, and the responsibility to stay out of range will remain, quite literally, in visitors’ own hands and footsteps.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
