One more step and my life could be at stake—at least that’s the vibe when you’re standing on an invisible line in the southwest corner of Yellowstone. In this video I hike into the so-called “Zone of Death,” a roughly 50-square-mile slice of the park that sits in Idaho but is handled by the federal District of Wyoming. I break down the legal loophole Professor Brian Kalt pointed out back in 2005: the Sixth Amendment requires a jury from both the state and the district where a crime happened, and in this specific patch of Yellowstone… nobody lives there to make a jury. I also try to put some nuance back into the story. This isn’t a “murder is legal” zone—murder is still illegal here—it’s just potentially hard to prosecute in a very specific worst-case scenario. I go over how prosecutors could still come after someone (conspiracy, kidnapping, transporting weapons across state lines, misdemeanors without juries, civil suits, and other creative approaches), plus the one real case that brushed up against this theory (an elk poaching case in the Montana section). And yes, I used onX to find the exact border, trails, and the designated campsites—because out here, the map lines are the whole point.