If there’s one wild animal you really don’t want to mess with, it’s a bison, especially during the bison rut season.
The National Parks Service has been warning people to keep their distance from wild animals all summer, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from bravely (or ignorantly) approaching bison in recent months. I’ve seen more people gored and thrown into the air just this summer than I have in my entire life.
This Yellowstone National Park tourist was fortunate that the bison was too busy grazing to notice her, allowing the woman to sneak past it and onto the walkway so that she could flee to safety on flat ground. Apparently the lady’s husband had other braved the steep hill and ran down to the below parking lot, but she was more scared of the steep incline than she was the big beast.
So she decides to slowly tip toe back towards the fence, all while keeping a close eye on the bison. The tourist makes her way to one of the fence’s posts, and pauses for a second to calculate her plan. She knows she needs to get to the walkway on the other side, but has to figure out if she wants to go over, under, or through the fence.
While carefully peering over at the bison on the hill, the woman finally decides to “pull the trigger” and begins to slowly climb through the opening in the middle of the fence. Doing so was probably the quietest option, but also left her pretty vulnerable if the bison were to turn around and notice her.
For some reason she holds her phone in her hand the whole time, and I’m not really sure why. I’m guessing she isn’t doing it for filming purposes, so she probably would have been better off stowing it away in her jean pocket so she could have two free hands. I’d also be worried that if something actually did go down, you might lose it in the process of either fleeing or being lifted into the heavens by one of the bison’s horns.
Luckily for the woman, she slides through the gap in the fence with ninja-like precision and then proceeds to slowly-fast-walk away from the bison. The beast never even turned to check in on the woman, which is a good thing for her. I’m not sure how her tip toe “mall walker speed” would have matched up against the Yellowstone bison.
Take a look:
