A man was hospitalized after a visibly agitated bull bison flipped him about eight feet in the air near a campground road.
A rampaging bison in Yellowstone National Park hooked a man who was trying to run away from it, and then tossed him about eight feet into the air at a campground. The man, Carl Isom-McDaniel, who serves on several local community boards in Washington State, suffered multiple broken bones.
The attack occurred at about 8:30 on Friday night at Bridge Bay Campground near Yellowstone Lake, in the southeastern quadrant of the park, in Wyoming. The visibly agitated bull bison was roaming the campground and charging at other groups of campers, as seen in a video taken by Mike MacLeod, a professional photographer based in Bozeman, Mont., about 130 miles away. There were plenty of tourists milling around, with sunset still about an hour away, and the campground was populated with small recreational vehicles and tents. Everyone was standing a distance away from the bison, which was most likely experiencing a surge of testosterone, as mating season is just beginning, Mr. MacLeod said in an interview on Sunday.
First the bison charged at a small group of teenage boys, who scattered, he said, before continuing to run around. Then, the bull bison stopped, wallowing in dirt next to a campground road just a few feet from a picnic table that still held dinner leftovers.
At that moment, a pickup truck drove by, and a man with a long white beard and his grandson stopped to take photos of the bison, he said. (Bison can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and, despite their prodigious size, sprint up to 30 miles an hour.) It appeared to onlookers that the bison had targeted the truck, he said. But once the truck drove away, the bison started chasing them around a cluster of pine trees. The grandson was able to dart away, Mr. MacLeod said, but the bison caught up to the grandfather, hooking him with its left horn near the hip before flipping him.