In my elementary school back in the early 1970’s, there was a memorial in the library for a boy a few years older than me. He had fallen into a boiling pool at Yellowstone while on family vacation.
I’ve told this story to my kids, so I’m reprinting it here in full. It’s from the Billings Gazetter circa 1998.
By Michael Milstein
The Billings Gazette
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. - On June 28, 1970, Andrew Hecht and his family watched Old Faithful shoot its scalding spray into the sky. Then the Buffalo, N.Y., family of five continued their first visit to Yellowstone National Park by following a path among nearby geysers and springs.
It was a path that would come to devastate the Hecht family and, later, to rattle the foundation of the U.S. national park system.
The path the family took led to a wooden boardwalk, which the Hechts followed to Crested Pool, a deep and quietly boiling aquamarine spring with a crusty white mineral rim. At the edge of the pool, without a guardrail, the boardwalk split at almost right angles and continued around the pool in each direction.
But 9-year-old Andy Hecht, for whatever reason - some say steam blinded him, others believe he tripped, fell or jumped - did not turn with the boardwalk. Instead, he went straight ahead and splashed into the seething spring.
His head rose once from the frothing water, his mouth agape but silent. Then he sank out of sight.
200 died in parks in 1970
Andy Hecht was one of about 200 people who died in the national park system in 1970. But his death was like no other because it rallied his parents to beat on the door - or perhaps beat down the door - of the National Park Service until the stolid agency finally took steps to make national parks safer.
The Hechts' campaign for safety in the national parks led to more funding and new safety officers in major parks and regional offices. Park visitors encountered more caution signs and alerts from rangers.
And this summer, after years of pleas by the family for some tribute to Andy, workers in Yellowstone installed new warning signs funded by the Hechts throughout the very Upper Geyser Basin where the boy died.
"A lot of it is just attitude," said Andy's father, James Hecht, a retired chemical engineer who now lives in Denver and keeps careful watch over park safety efforts. "It's not that no one in the Park Service pays attention to safety, but it just takes one act of negligence to leave a person without warning that might prevent them from getting killed."
Last year 179 visitors were killed in national parks - six of them in Yellowstone, not including the two Yellowstone employees also killed.
The worrisome numbers force park managers onto a delicate tightrope. They must protect the millions of people who visit the parks - often without realizing the dangers of wild settings. But they must do so without sanitizing the very wild settings that so many people come to see.
"We have to identify to the best of our abilities the risks visitors are encountering," said Richard Powell, the National Park Service's top safety officer, based in Denver. "We can't prevent them, but we can tell people: `Here's what you face.' And I think we can do a better job with that."
Both the weaknesses and strengths of the Park Service's approach to safety show themselves in the tragic death of Andy Hecht and its aftermath.
The Hechts had arrived in Yellowstone after flying from New York to Billings, renting a car and driving over the Beartooth Highway to the park's northeast entrance.
No rangers at entrance
It was late in the day and no rangers were on duty, James Hecht recalls, so the Hechts entered Yellowstone for the first time without receiving any maps, information or warnings.
At Old Faithful, the family talked with a ranger, who told them about the trails through the geyser basin but did not warn them of the boiling water that often lies just beneath thin mineral crusts, James Hecht said.
Andy was walking with his older brother and sister - and amid a crowd that had dispersed from Old Faithful - when he plunged into Crested Pool. His father remembers the shock.
"Why us? How could this happen? When it happened we weren't out in the wilderness. We were on the boardwalk.
"We think of Andy when we look at our other two kids," says James Hecht. "He would be 37 now. He was a terrific kid, very bright. He was very outgoing. He was gutsy. He'd play football with bigger boys and dive for the ball. He was a charmer. He was interested in the pretty girl across the street."
Unable to sleep that night, James Hecht arose and wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel. In writing, he told Hickel: "I torture myself, but I do it in an effort to give a little more meaning to Andy's life. We believe his tragic death was caused by inadequate safety precautions."
Congress responded by more than doubling funding for the Park Service's safety program, which paid for new safety officers in major parks and regional offices.
Soon crews in Yellowstone rerouted the boardwalk so it no longer encircled Crested Pool and erected a railing to prevent future falls. They also added more warning signs.
While John Hast, the National Park Service's top safety officer at the time, acknowledged the park's insufficient warnings, he concluded that such messages would not have prevented Andy Hecht's death.
After four hours of watching visitors near Crested Pool in August 1970, Hast wrote to higher-ups that "the demonstrated lack of parental control while in these areas is alarming. . . . We must find a better way to reach people with a message on the hazards of the areas."
In the wake of accidents, James Hecht said, the Park Service pays more attention to what the victims did wrong than what park rangers might have done to prevent the accidents.
"People will do something foolish and the Park Service says they're foolish, but the question is, did they know of the risk?" he says. "Did the Park Service take the reasonable steps to promote knowledge of the risk?"
The Hechts settled their $1 million lawsuit against the government for $20,000 and used the money to start a foundation named for their son that sponsored a safety award for Park Service employees.
Today, visitors to Yellowstone receive a park newspaper with pages of red safety warnings. It has been 10 years since someone died due to burns in Yellowstone and that was in an undeveloped, backcountry geyser basin.
"The information is there, but we can't force people to read it," says Yellowstone safety officer Galen Warren. "We have to hope they do."
The Hechts visited every Park Service director since Andy's death to discuss safety and their hope for some kind of memorial to their son in Yellowstone. Every director resisted the plea, responding that they could not turn parks into impromptu graveyards, until the Hechts visited Roger Kennedy, who was Park Service director until last year.
Kennedy directed officials to work with the Hechts and the park staff proposed updated signs warning of the dangers of the geyser basin with a short mention of Andy's death.
I went to a conference this autumn about public lands usage. The discussion in a van on the way back from an off-site event was about how the parks can and/or should manage risky behavior.
