IT IS A MYSTERY WHY ANYONE would dive headfirst into a Yellowstone hot spring merely to save a dog, but that is precisely what happened on July 20, 1981. David Allen Kirwan, 24, of La Canada, California, and his friend Ronald Ratliff, 25, of Thousand Oaks, parked their truck at Yellowstone’s Fountain Paint Pot parking lot at around one o’clock that afternoon.
While the men looked at the hot springs, Ratliff’s dog Moosie, a large mastiff or Great Dane, escaped from the vehicle and jumped into nearby Celestine Pool, a hot spring later measured at 202 degrees Fahrenheit. The dog began yelping, and someone nearby quipped, “Oh, look, the poor thing!” Kirwan and Ratliff rushed to the spring and stood on the edge of it.
Ratliff and another bystander both saw that Kirwan was preparing to go into the spring, and the bystander yelled, “Don’t go in there!” Kirwan yelled back, “Like hell I won’t!” Several more people yelled not to go in, but Kirwan took two steps into the pool then dove headfirst into the boiling water. One witness described it as a flying, swimming-pool-type dive.
Visitor Earl Welch of Annistow, Alabama, saw Kirwan actually swim to the dog and attempt to take it to shore, go completely underwater again, then release the dog, and begin trying to climb out. Ronald Ratliff pulled Kirwan from the spring, sustaining second-degree burns to his feet. Welch saw Kirwan appear to stagger backward, so the visitor hastened to him and said, “Give me your hand.” Kirwan offered his hand, and Welch directed, “Come to the sidewalk.”
As they moved slowly toward the walk, Kirwan managed to say, “That was stupid. How bad am I?” Welch tried to reassure him, and before they reached the walkway Kirwan again spoke softly. “That was a stupid thing I did.”
Welch was suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that he was walking with a corpse. He could see that Kirwan’s entire body was badly burned, as the skin was already peeling off. It seemed to Welch that Kirwan was blind, for his eyes appeared totally white. Another man ran up and began to remove one of Kirwan’s shoes, and the men watched horrified as the skin came off with it. “Don’t do that!” said Welch, and Kirwan responded very tiredly, “It doesn’t matter.” Near the spring, rangers found two large pieces of skin shaped like human hands.
Kirwan experienced third-degree burns over 100 percent of his body including his entire head. He was taken to the clinic at Old Faithful, where a burn specialist who was coincidentally on duty could do little for him other than to pump in intravenous fluids at a high rate.
Bob Carnes, a ranger who saw him at the clinic, remembers thinking that Kirwan did not have a chance for survival. “He was blind and most of his skin was coming off.” Tony Sisto, Old Faithful’s acting subdistrict ranger, was also there, and he agreed. “He had no vision,” said Sisto, “but was fully conscious. He talked amiably with his caretakers, in no pain, asking the nurses to save his belt while they cut off what remained of his clothes.” Ronald Ratliff’s dog died in the pool and was not rescued.
Oils from its body later made the hot spring have small eruptions. Kirwan died the following morning in a Salt Lake City hospital. In the men’s truck, rangers found the park’s warning literature and pamphlets. Kirwan and Ratliff had not read any of them.
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