Yellowstone National Park, famous for geysers and wide open spaces, closed for the first time in 34 years this week as floods inundated its roads.
The first national park in the US, located in Montana and Wyoming, is contending with severe infrastructure damage after heavy rains and snowmelt caused the Yellowstone River and its tributaries to swell.
The floods forced the National Park Service to completely evacuate Yellowstone, shepherding 10,000 people out of wilderness, campsites, and settlements across the park, which is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
"It is just the scariest river ever," Kate Gomez, a tourist who was visiting from Santa Fe, New Mexico, told The Associated Press, adding, "Anything that falls into that river is gone."
There were no known injuries or deaths as of Tuesday, according to a statement from the park. The entire park is temporarily closed.
"The rainfall rates never really got all that high," Marc Chenard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told Insider. "It was more of a prolonged period of steady rainfall, and then you combine that with the snow melt, and you got these pretty significant rises on the river."
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