A trio of young adults and five teens were injured Friday night — one severely — when their vehicle crashed down a steep embankment in the South Fork area.

The group had been traveling on Stagecoach Trail and was about a mile from its intersection with the Lower Southfork Road when the 19-year-old driver of their southbound Chevy Suburban missed a hairpin turn, authorities say. The vehicle wound up rolling and landed on its top.

“It was a bad deal,” said Park County Sheriff Darrell Steward. “If you don’t know that area, that corner will sneak right up on you; it’s a hard one.”

A 911 call came into the sheriff’s office’s dispatch center at around 8:15 p.m. While there was initially no one on the other end of the line, a dispatcher was able to ping the location. Both a sheriff’s deputy and law enforcement ranger with the Bureau of Land Management happened to be on the South Fork and reached the scene in a matter of minutes. 

With eight injured parties, a slew of other agencies were dispatched as well, including ambulances from both Cody Regional Health and Powell Valley Healthcare.

One of the passengers — a teenage male — wound up being flown from the scene to a Billings hospital by Guardian Flight, Steward said. Three other occupants were taken to the Cody hospital for various injuries, while the other four young people were checked out at the scene and then released.

Steward said five occupants were between the ages of 14 and 16 while the others were aged 18, 19 and 20.

He said the young people had been working at Scouting America’s Camp Buffalo Bill on the North Fork and are not from this area.

They were later joined by others from several agencies, including the Cody Volunteer Fire Department and Wyoming Highway Patrol.

Steward said it sounded like all of the entities worked well together, adding that, “It was good that people got up there quick.”

As of Monday, he was still waiting for a final report on the incident.