I was only 17 at the time. If this were to happen now, I almost assuredly would. I just remember feeling a sense of extreme psychological discomfort and a strong urge to avoid looking.
On the way up, your view is largely filled by a huge chunk of rock a few feet in front of you. On the way down, it consists of a spectacular panorama that includes vertiginous dropoffs thousands of feet high.
Could the report have just been released, putting the whole “his body dissolved overnight” thing back in the news?
That NPS report was heartbreaking. The SAR guy who wanted to keep searching but couldn’t was bad enough, but the handwritten notes from the sister were worse.
And man, in those pictures, the water really does look like boiling acid. And he was reaching out to feel it when he slipped and fell in… ouch. How long would it take to die or at least lose consciousness from being submerged in boiling liquid?
If you read the entire PDF (not that I’d blame you if you didn’t) the death certificate asserts death occurred in “seconds”. This may have been based on information in the video from the smartphone which you don’t get to see via the PDF.
Is that reliable information or hopeful thinking? I don’t know.
The third option is “sustained injury incompatible with continuing to live within seconds”. There’s no sense having some sort of life guard to perform rescue service…
So let me get this straight. From the discussion, there are four ways to die in a national park like Yellowstone.
You can boil to death in a thermal pool.
You can die in the woods and quickly decompose into fertilizer that turns into meadow plants.
You can be eaten by a predator.
You can fall from a great height.
So the choices are…
Soup, Salad, Appetizer or (pudding) Dessert?
Yeah, I had to stop at the photos. That poor girl.
Because redactions in a PDF (and most Word files) are the equivalent of putting a post-it note over the info; it’s still in the file, just tagged “do not display” (unless you’re smart enough to know how, which isn’t very).
Newer versions of Acrobat Pro have a full-fledged Redact tool.
Bravo! You win the thread. That dramatic crescendo is sublime.
All facetiousness aside (and I loved the punchline too), for almost the entire history of the NPS the most common cause of death in National Parks has been cardiovascular events. For a short period of time during the early 1980’s this was supplanted by deaths from late-stage HIV infection, because terminal AIDS victims deliberately chose to die in a beautiful and peaceful place. But for the most part, the single most common cause of involuntary death in the NP system always has been, and probably always will be, failure of the cardiovascular system.
The thermal impact from hitting water that runs between 218-250 degrees F would result in the individual involuntarily gasping, allowing the hot, slightly acidic water entry to the lungs. I imagine death within seconds is not hopeful thinking at that point.
Endorphins would rapidly kick in and the person would probably feel pain for only a short time.
With all the senior citizens who go to those parks, I can certainly believe it.
On a not-so-unrelated note, I was surprised to find out that the most common cause of death for LEOs, which would include park rangers, who die in the line of duty is not gunshot wounds. It’s automobile accidents.
I heard that years ago. While I wouldn’t have thought of it, it’s very logical. Think how much time state troopers and deputies and such spend on the road.
You left out lightning strike, drowning, freezing, falling objects (rocks thrown from above, landslides), and in Yellowstone eruptions of clouds of poisonous gas that can accumulate in low-lying areas and cause asphyxiation. Also one’s fellow humans via means like car accidents, bar fights, and other mayhem.
Although bravo on the spoiler.
It’s tragic, however it seems a lot less people get hurt than should. Every time we go to a national park we see several people acting stupidly.
Which can be part of the problem.
For example, Yellowstone NP has lots of bison. They are potentially quite dangerous, and injure people every year. Plenty of signs warn of the danger.
But much of the time they take little notice of humans and generally act no more threatening than a herd of cows. So people soon abandon their wary behavior, and pretty soon are posing their kids next to the baby bison for a photo. Even this sort of stupidity only occasionally leads to trouble.
Human nature doesn’t tend to handle 1% risk very well.
Darwin is weaker selective pressure than would be good for the gene pool’s overall hygiene.
Just a short, say, 2 minutes?
My Father claims that when he visited the Grand Canyon with his now ex-wife she wanted to take a picture of him by the edge and she kept telling him back up, ok back up some more, a little more, little bit more, and suddenly he looked down and was at the very edge with the ground crumbling under his foot, basically that she was trying to get rid of him.