A 3-year-old child suffered second-degree burns in Yellowstone National Park on Friday after falling into a thermal feature near Midway Geyser Basin.

Park officials said the child "took off running from the trail, slipped and then fell into a small thermal feature" in the area of the Fountain Freight Road at 11:39 a.m. 

The child was burned on its lower body and back, Yellowstone officials said in a Friday afternoon new release, and was taken by helicopter to the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center's Burn Center in Idaho Falls. WebMD describes second-degree burns as "partial thickness burns," which reach the lower layer of a person's skin and cause pain, redness, swelling and blistering. They are more serious than first-degree burns, but less severe than third- or fourth-degree burns.

Friday's incident was the second signfiicant injury reported at a Yellowstone thermal area this year.  In May, a visitor who'd illegally entered the park fell into a thermal feature near Old  Faithful while backing up  to take a photo. Last year, a man similarly fell into thermal water and suffered severe burns while trespassing near the cone of Old Faithful.

The last fatality involving a Yellowstone thermal area came in June 2016, when a man left the boardwalk and slipped into a hot spring in the Norris Geyser Basin.

"The ground in hydrothermal areas is fragile and thin, and there is scalding water just below the surface," park officials said in Friday's news release. "Visitors must always remain on boardwalks and trails and exercise extreme caution around thermal features."