CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The deaths of at least six Italian and Chinese tourists in a fiery van crash in Idaho near Yellowstone National Park are a reminder that the roads leading into the popular international destination can be as dangerous as the region’s grizzly bears and boiling hot pools.

The van collided with a pickup truck Thursday on a highway just west of Yellowstone. Both vehicles caught fire, and the survivors were taken to hospitals with injuries, according to police. The tourists who were killed were from Italy and China, officials said.

Meanwhile, Idaho State Police said Saturday that the driver of the tour van involved in a deadly collision with a pickup truck was licensed in California and the company that organized the trip was Ctour Holiday LLC, a large tour operator that provides international travel services.

The Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco said eight Chinese citizens were injured in the crash. The accident comes after a crash in 2019 of a bus from Las Vegas carrying Chinese tourists that rolled over near southern Utah’s Bryce National Park, killing four people and injuring dozens more.

Where the van in Thursday’s accident was coming from and going was unknown. Some Yellowstone roads, including the one south of Old Faithful — the park’s most famous geyser — were still closed after the snowy winter.

The highway where the accident happened south of West Yellowstone, Montana, offers a way to get between Yellowstone and Grand Teton at this time of year, before a north-south route is plowed and the park fully opens for summer.

National parks including the world’s first, Yellowstone, draw visitors from worldwide

According to the most recent data from the International Trade Administration, 36% of international visitors who arrived to the U.S. by air listed visits to national parks and national monuments as their top leisure activity while in the U.S.

Seventeen percent of Yellowstone’s visitors came from other countries in 2016, according to a park visitor use study with the most recent comprehensive data available.

Visitors from Europe and Asia accounted for the majority of travelers from outside the U.S., with 34% from China, 11% from Italy and 10% from Canada.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed those numbers significantly, said Brian Riley whose Wyoming-based business, Old Hand Holdings, markets the Yellowstone region in China and runs tours.

“Every Chinese is taught how great Yellowstone is in their elementary school,” Riley said Friday.

The pandemic put a sharp brake on tourism of all kinds but especially from China, which has yet to recover, Riley observed. Now visits by people already living in the U.S. account for most visits by Chinese, he said.

“Foreigners in general they don’t feel safe over here like they did before,” Riley said Friday.

“The Chinese are kind of preaching that behind the scenes.”

The U.S. tourism industry expected 2025 to be another good year for foreign visitors. But several months in, international arrivals have been plummeting. Angered by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and rhetoric, and alarmed by reports of tourists being arrested at the border, some citizens of other countries are staying away from the U.S. and choosing to travel elsewhere.

Riley, who grew up in Jackson, Wyoming, just south of Grand Teton and lived in China for a time to learn Mandarin and why Chinese wanted to visit the U.S., is more focused of late on getting them to visit Hawaii, a state perceived as less dangerous.