My wife and I were at Hetch Hetchy Res hiking the trail past Tueeulala Falls to Wapama Falls when this accident occurred. With the high water and overspray on the rocks everything around the falls is very slick.
A lot of folks who visit our Nations’ parks have what I call “Amusement Park Mentallity.” That is, they think everything is safe and staged, that they can’t be harmed. These are not roller coaster rides at 6 flags. The warning signs should be heeded. My wife sat on a rock on the side of the trail by Wapama and the rock slipped. She came very close to going over the edge. A couple from Portand, OR happened to be close by and rescued her. Turns out thats what they do. Mountain search and rescue team members. Thank God they were there. I was back up the trail a ways and couldn’t get to her. Let’s be careful out there folks. Jim
Glad your wife escaped. I’ve seen several tragedies in person.
On my first two annual visits to Wisconin’s premiere state park, Peninsula State Park in Door County, I was the first physician on site at two accidental deaths. The first was a slip and fall from a cliff and I was flagged down by a family member. The mother had fallen off a 60 ft cliff after climbing over a safety rail to get a “better view”. I had to tell the family she was already dead.
The next year I was at a drowning when the victim was pulled from the water after falling out of a fishing boat. Another physician and his nurse wife were in the parking lot. He was an ER physicician and had a “crash kit”. We started CPR and an IV with meds. He and I gave CPR but the victim never regained a pulse after 30 minutes of continuous CPR. The EMT’s arrived at that time.
IT’s not just national parks. People tend to thing that they can do what they want, when they want. I grew up on the CA coast, in a small fishing town called Morro Bay. The harbor there is one of the most dangerous in the US, due to a bar that builds at the mouth of the harbor. Every summer, tourists would fill town from the central valleys of CA, bringing their boats and what we used to call “vacation brains”. There would be a small craft advisory, and the harbor patrol would have to turn these people around as they approached the mouth, and they would always say something like, " Gee, this isn’t a small boat, it’s 24 feet long!! Why can’t you just let us do what we want???" This is what some nowadays call “nanny state” protections.
These same people would go out on the breakwater and get crushed by rocks the size of minivans when the waves slammed in. Then their family would sue, and the papers would cry, and people would look to blame the “nanny state” for not being a better nanny.
People…it is what it is. When these kind of things happen, people call it a tragedy…but I would challenge their definition. This is simply a waste of potential.
That’s California. I used to live there. I remember a legal case where some folks climed over an 8 foot locked gate to get to a breakwater and one of them was washed off of it and the family sued because the gate could be climbed over. Don’t know what the verdict was but after OJ, who knows.
I also know of another case of a driver that sued Chrysler because his wife got the post of the rear view mirror through the front of her head. He was drunk, the car was before the days of the break away mirrors that are now glued to the window instead of screwed into the metal roof, and she did not have on her seat belt. He won.