I looked to see what happened to the guy who “disappeared into” Porkchop geyser in Yellowstone Park back in early June - apparently he walked off the boardwalk and according to witnesses, just sort of vanished.
It was the next day or so that park rangers said they were not going to attempt to retrieve his body - because for one thing “no remains had been found.” Both stories are relatively short and there’s been no followup that I’ve found.
This is puzzling in so many ways. The geysers, are, for the most part, no bigger than swimming pools. Even with some depth, the water tends to be very clear. How could a fully dressed man’s body disappear within one? How are they sure he’s even in there and this is not some kind of elaborate hoax or ruse?
Well, the low pH of your stomach contents at body temperature is a major component of how your body digests proteins, and people are largely made of protein/meat… crank up the temperature and the chemical reactions proceed faster and more energetically… A chicken carcass in my crockpot subjected to heat even in a comparatively neutral pH environment is literally falling apart after 12 hours…
I expect after a few hours, nevermind a few days, the combination of acidic environment and near-boiling hot heat would reduce a person to leftover clothing bits and scattered bones. A little longer and maybe the bones would go to mush.
You’re basically talking about making long pork stew in a slow cooker full of acid. You’ll need an acid-proof ladle to get anything at all after about 12-24 hours, if that long. Longer than that, you have human-flavored broth.
Someone I worked with back in the '80 had previously worked at a mortuary. She had a friend who was a paramedic. The paramedic told her about ‘Bucket Lady’. This was a woman who was drinking wine in her hot tub. For whatever reason, she passed out and drowned. By the time someone found her (I want to say a couple of weeks later, but I don’t remember), they had to take her out in buckets.
Then there was ‘Worm Boy’. But that’s not germane to this conversation.
A few years back I was in Yellowstone for the week before it closed for the winter. Park was very empty. Saw a fair number of idiots leave the boardwalks to look down into a geyser or hot spring - I guess they thought that if there were no rangers around, it must be safe. Also saw a guy walking up to take a closeup of a full-grown bull elk who was guarding his harem. With a tripod. Fortunately (maybe unfortunately) a ranger stopped him before the elk had a chance to kick his ass.
If it weren’t for the rangers, the number of Darwin awards that could be earned in Yellowstone would be staggering…
About 20 years ago, I had a family member die on a rather hot waterbed (about 100F). Not found for several days. When this was mentioned to a family friend, a pathologist, he shuddered and simply said, “Soup.”
I saw an award for a fellow whose dog ran into one of the pools of bubbling acid.
He ran after his dog.
According to my memory of the write-up’s representation of what a witness saw:
He came out almost instantly and could still talk. As large hunks of flesh dropped off his skeleton.
Yea, I’d guess there would not be a whole lot left after 24 hours. Not even a belt buckle, let alone the last seen of shipwreck victims: shoes.
In that case, the dog could not be recovered. We managed to grab the dog collar but nothing else. Because there was nothing else left. Well, we did detect a bit of an oil / fat slick but that dissipated rather quickly.
The location in the Norris Geyser Basin contains hot pools has very high acidic levels. Combined with boiling water, and a body readily breaks apart and dissolves in practically no time, including the bones. There is a series of way off-trail pools north of the Old Faithful area (near the Mary Mountain West trail-head) that used to contain lots of bones, including humans. IIRC, the Park Service never had any official comment on those. It’s surmised someone was off-trail and just walked into the pool, never to be heard from again. There was never a lost persons report filed and no one came asking.
He was a boy who had the entire world’s population of intestinal worms coming out of his orifices. I don’t remember if he was dead or alive, because Bucket Lady sounded more interesting.
