Given that he was old and left a note, it might have been half a dare and half a suicide. Something like “I’ll do that before I die! Maybe I’ll fall, but I’m old anyway, so it’s worth the risk.”
What I want to know is if people who get themselves into situations where the Coast Guard or National Guard or other agency has to rescue their stupid selves, do they receive a bill for the cost of the rescue?
Any backpacker knows that they have to be extra careful in washes. Sometimes its not easily apparent in wooded areas. Besides the terrain you can also see signs of prior flooding. Like brush swept into a pile, logs and so on.
Making camp in a wash can be the last mistake you ever make. Even hiking in one can be fatal if you get caught in a heavy rain.
I’ll go with “Jeez peoples sure is dumb” because the wording on the sign (at Vernal Falls/Yosemite) is blunt and explicit:
**SMOOTH SLIPPERY ROCKS
MOVING WATER
STAY BACK FROM THE WATER’S EDGE. IF YOU SLIP AND GO OVER THE WATERFALL YOU WILL DIE.**
Works for me.
Any time you go out into a wild area, especially alone, you should leave an itenerary with someone detailing where you’re going and when you expect to be back. People slip, trip, or fall all the time even in relatively harmless places and break an arm or leg or otherwise get stranded. If nobody knows where you are or when they should start looking for you, you could certainly find yourself in dire straits for a long time waiting for help.
So I don’t see his note left with the concierge at the hotel as a suicide note, more as a prudent safety measure. I do this EVERY time I go hiking or fishing by myself in the local National Parks and Forests.
Jeez, maybe the problem is that we’ve been socialized to disregard warning signs. That might be the problem.
How many people here have haven’t driven over the speed limit, smoked, or eaten too much bacon, or consumed too much alcohol, or tore off a mattress tag, or didn’t exercise enough, or didn’t invest enough for retirement, or, or, or???
Or haven’t read the “User Agrement” that pops up with every upgrade to Adobe Flash and every other program on the planet which could say “Hey, we’re gonna kill your kids and puppies if you don’t refrain from reading that mattress tag.” After which, most people click “Install.”
“Most notable in Yosemite were warnings about the danger of going near the water at the tops of waterfalls: if you fall in, there’s little chance of being extracted before you go over the edge.”
“If you fall in.” Most people don’t fall into something and can easily refrain from such so no concern in their eys.
…but kudos to Machine Elf for pointing out that some warning signs are pretty fucking serious!!
That sure is a pretty waterfall, though. It’s like every cartoon waterfall is modelled after it.
You should see it up close!
When I saw the pic I was all like “yep. That sure is a waterfall all right.”
I recall reading a couple of years ago about a similar story which happened in England where a father and his young son had to be rescued after getting stuck in a mud-flat with an incoming tide. The best bit? They had to be rescued again the next day with again a full emergency reponse and time in hospital to make sure they were OK.
I can’t recall the exact words but the father was interviewed he quite obviously was off the opinion that he hadn’t done anything wrong, was totally unappreciative of the danger he had put himself and his son in, thought the emergency services and hospital staff had nothing better to do than rescue him from his idiotic antics and were paid for by magic fairy dust and would quite happily do the exact same thing again.
I have a lot of sympathy for people who make a mistake, we’re all only human after, but there are lot of people out there that the only reason they’re still alive is that everyone else spends their time looking out for them.
btw thats a pretty disturbing video, they don’t seem to realise at all at the start the danger they’re in. Unfortunately there are some mistakes people only get to make once.
Offered without comment, because I don’t have an informed opinion: various photos of Victoria Falls’ Devil’s Pool
This. It’s not to hard to sympathize with the victim of a somewhat “hidden” danger like a flash flood or an avalanche; if you’ve never been in the mountains during the winter you may not recognize an avalanche chute, and if you’ve never been in the desert a wash or a slot canyon may not strike you as anything to be wary of. But then you’ve got the folks who try to pet bears in Yellowstone, or who fall off the edge of the Grand Canyon… Is it really necessary to put a “WARNING! FALL RISK!” sign next to the edge of a mile-deep hole in the ground? Really, some of these “accidents” are clearly God pouring chlorine in the gene pool.
My husband was one of those people once. Signs meant nothing to him until I took him for a walk in the Grand Canyon.
Now, growing up hillwalking in Scotland, where there are countless hillwalking deaths every year- from everything from avalanches to hypothermia- you’d think he’d know. Not so. He once tried to drag me through knee-deep, iced-over snow. The other people we saw had poles and ice-axes. Nope. No further for me.
At the Grand Canyon, fully kitted in hiking boots and long sleeves, I pulled him over to see a poster. A woman who’d run in the Boston Marathon who’d died in the Canyon while pushing what you can do in a day. There are at least two BM runners that have died that way, actually.
See this, I said, it gets hot here. And this is the opposite of what you’ve done before. Going down first is a piece of piss. Coming back up, when you’re tired, hot and thirsty, isn’t. And it isn’t Bright Angel, so there isn’t a good place to fill up your water on this trail until nearly the bottom, if not the bottom itself.
He didn’t believe me until the trip back up. I was a wreck. He was exhausted. We’d only gone down a few miles, then back up. There were other people, still going down, past our stopping point, who were heading down in flip-flops and tank tops. They had no water, no food, nothing to cover up with when they started burning. Then he understood how people die there too.
Today’s news provides one more data point in support of “Jeez peoples sure is dumb:”
California man on church trip washes away over 600-foot Yosemite waterfall
A tangential nitpick: Mattress tags are labeled ‘do not remove this tag under penalty of law except by consumer.’
So, if you eat the mattress, you’re fine.