Death in Zion National Park
Stories of Accidents and Foolhardiness in Utah’s Grand Circle
Randi Minetor
An imprint of Globe Pequot
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ISBN 978-1-4930-2893-1 (paperback)
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Contents
Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Perils of the Vertical Vacation
Chapter 1: Trapped in an Instant: Flash Floods in the Narrows
Chapter 2: Rising Waters: Incidents in Other Canyons
Chapter 3: Crossing the Neck: Angels Landing
Chapter 4: The Edge of Forever: Falls from High Places
Chapter 5: Daring Fate: Climbing, Canyoneering, and BASE Jumping Accidents
Chapter 6: Sudden Darkness: The Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel
Chapter 7: Due Process: Deaths by Suspicious Circumstances
Chapter 8: On the Road: Vehicular Deaths
Chapter 9: Unclassified: Deaths by Unusual Causes
Epilogue: How to Stay Alive in Zion National Park
Appendix: List of Deaths 1908–2016 in Chronological Order
Bibliography
About the Author
Preface
This book details the ninety-two deaths that have taken place in Zion National Park, as well as some near-death experiences included to illustrate the kinds of hazards this park presents to the adventurous visitor. Most of these incidents have taken place since the park achieved federal protection as Mukuntuweap National Monument in 1909, and as Zion National Park in 1919. This is not surprising, as the park’s popularity has increased steadily since that time to record attendance of 4,317,028 in 2016.
There may actually be more than ninety-two people whose deaths took place in the park, but the media and other sources do not always make note of people who happened to die of natural causes during their visit. If it appears I have missed the passing of your loved one, please feel free to get in touch with me at [email protected] to provide any factual information you may have available. I will be sure to include it in the book’s next edition.
As you read this book, please keep in mind that while more and more people visit Zion every year, on average only one to two people per year actually perish while at the park. The news in recent years included one incident in 2015 that took the lives of seven people, and pairs of climbers or hikers sometimes meet death at the same time, but the overall number of fatal incidents remains low. Please do not take this collection of stories as any indication that you should not visit this extraordinary park. See these instead as opportunities for you to learn the best and most effective skills for approaching any trail, rock face, river, road, or tunnel in Zion—and in any other wilderness area. Death in Zion National Park should serve as reinforcement of the basic rules of safety recommended to every visitor by the National Park Service. (I’ve collected these guidelines and survival tips and included them in the epilogue of this book.)
Zion National Park is my favorite of all the national parks—and as of this writing, I have visited 306 of the 417 units of the National Park Service, so I have some significant basis for comparison. I urge you to visit this park, explore its winding trails, discover its hanging gardens and slot canyons, ride the scenic roads in a car or on a bicycle, and gaze at the magnificent views of stratified red sandstone towering two thousand feet above the canyon floor. You will see no landscape on earth to rival this one, so make the most of your visit by venturing into its concealed areas, from the splendor of Refrigerator Canyon to the power of the eighty-foot waterfall at Upper Emerald Pool. Any wilderness area presents some risks, but when you take a few simple safety precautions and heed the advice of the park’s rangers, your visit will be filled with wonders beyond your imagination.
Introduction: The Perils of the Vertical Vacation
You are about to read of the ninety-two people who arrived at Zion National Park expecting to have the time of their lives but all ended up dead. There is no kinder way to put this, so I want to be as upfront as possible with you about the contents of this book. It’s the result of significant research: an extensive review of media coverage, official documents, and other forms of investigation, and my own efforts to discern the facts in each case based on the information available.
All of the stories you are about to read are true, to the best of my ability to determine the truth. In many cases I attempted to retrieve records of police and FBI investigations, using the Freedom of Information Act and Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA) to request aged files. I discovered that Washington County Sheriff’s Office records dating back before 1997 are not available, making it quite impossible to determine what conclusions might have been drawn in older cases. Even the FBI did not have records of continuing investigations in deaths that were deemed to have occurred under suspicious circumstances, leaving us with no further clues once the media coverage ran its course. I am sorry to leave my readers with loose ends, but facts are facts, and not all cases could be solved.
Death in Zion National Park also reveals the tremendous search and rescue operations available to the people who visit here—the professionals, volunteers, and regional resources that penetrate the park’s most treacherous landscapes to rescue people when they can, and when this is not possible, to bring out the remains of someone’s loved one and allow the family to achieve closure. I wish I could detail for you the thousands of successful rescues the area’s search teams complete: the retrieval of hundreds of people every year who stray off of trails, become lost or injured, or realize in a moment of sudden clarity that they have truly taken on more than they can handle. These visitors come home safely each season thanks to the tireless efforts of these heroes; only a tiny fraction—usually fewer than two people per year—lose their lives.
You will find that I have treated these incidents with respect, as I must consider the number of times I myself could have made a wrong turn in the wilderness and ended up just like the people who did not come home. While some of these stories might encourage a snicker behind closed doors and a sense of schadenfreude—a superiority to those who wandered off into a slot canyon, for example, and were met with a sixty-foot wall of waterborne debris—most of these accidents and incidents could happen to any of us. Most important, every tale has something to teach us.
The vast majority of these stories illustrate the results of uncommon bad luck: a rock that turned underfoot, a change in the weather just minutes after a party left cellular phone range, a knot not tied at the end of a rope, or a patch of ice in the worst possible place. A few happened because of neglect or foolishness, and a number of incidents took place for the sheer cussedness of attempting them—a grit and determination that turned out to be misguided. Perhaps worst of all, a handful were deliberate acts of desperation: thre
e suicides, a fall that led to a murder trial, an unsolved case involving a pool of blood and a bloody backpack, and one death at the end of a night of drunkenness.
If this book encourages you to go to Zion National Park for no other reason than to see the peak of Angels Landing, the windings of the Narrows, the waterfalls of Emerald Pools, the mile-long darkness of Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel, and the depths of Kolob, Keyhole, and Pine Creek Canyons, then I will consider my efforts here a rousing success. Go, if you must, to see where people met bad ends, but stay to savor the views of vermillion cliffs, variegated rock faces, sparkling waters, and parti-colored sunsets. Zion is my favorite of all of America’s national parks, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to invite you to see it for yourself.
Be careful out there.
Chapter 1
Trapped in an Instant: Flash Floods in the Narrows
The names of the fourteen hikers in the Narrows of Zion Canyon on July 27, 1998, did not become part of the record reported in the Salt Lake Tribune two days later, but their gruesome find certainly did—and the report, at least in the short term, chilled many a hiker’s enthusiasm for braving the waters of the North Fork of the Virgin River.
The Virgin River sculpts a dramatic and compelling corridor through the heart of Zion National Park, one that lures otherwise cautious hikers to take on a challenge entirely different from the ones they find on dry land. Here sandstone walls stretch upward for a thousand feet or more, allowing a glistening ribbon of water to find its way between them with only twenty or thirty feet of tolerance on either side. Sunlight generally forsakes this slim waterway, making this a dim or even murky journey—but when a shaft of natural light casts a momentary glow on a towering wall, the effect can be so remarkable that hikers pause to admire the play of sun and shadow against the folds of sandstone glowing in shades of vermillion, white gold, and mahogany.
On the floor of the canyon, the Virgin River polishes the rocks in its bed into slippery spheres, making a hike through even ankle-deep water tricky at best. The effect is like walking on “buttered bowling balls,” as my husband phrased it during our most recent hike through the canyon. Every hiker knows—or discovers, much to his or her chagrin—that a sturdy walking stick is an absolute must, providing a necessary third point of contact with the ground while the hiker feels for a stable foothold with each cautious step forward. In Springdale, the park’s entrance town, a viable industry has developed to provide Narrows hikers with canyoneering shoes, neoprene socks, walking sticks, dry suits in winter (when the water temperature drops to thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit), and wet suits in summer to help prevent soaking-wet hikers from developing hypothermia in the chilly shade of the upper canyon.
The bulk of the visitor traffic begins at the south end of the canyon where the park shuttle stops at the Temple of Sinawava, with hikers beginning their journey on the easy Riverside Walk. At the end of the mile-long paved path, it’s time to plunge into the water and hike in the river to the canyon’s narrowest point, about two and a half miles up the canyon. Here delighted visitors discover the slot canyons, gorgeous examples of the interplay of water, sandstone, and light as the walls stand barely twenty feet apart. “This is the slot canyon that all other slot canyons are compared to,” writes photographer Joe Braun on his website, Joe’s Guide to Zion National Park.
For casual hikers eager to see the best that Zion has to offer, this short but strenuous trek offers tremendous rewards in multiple megabytes of photos, access to hidden natural wonders that cannot be seen from any road, and bragging rights: Only the bravest visitors venture past the end of the Riverside Walk to see the magic in the heart of Zion Canyon.
Those who crave a more challenging experience of the canyon take the route less traveled, beginning at the north end at Chamberlain’s Ranch. The daunting sixteen-mile route usually takes two days (though some power hikers finish it in one) and involves an overnight stay at one of the twelve designated campsites along the North Fork of the Virgin River. The park requires hiking parties to obtain a permit to hike the Narrows from the north end, and to make a reservation to use one of the campsites. This allows the park to control the number of people who hike the Narrows at any one time—but equally important, the permit and campsite reservation give the rangers a fairly good idea of where hikers are at any given time. If anything goes wrong and the hikers do not arrive safely at the end of the hike within a few hours of their expected time, search and rescue crews can deduce how far along the party might be.
Why the concern? While hiking the Narrows at its most shallow may result in an unplanned dunking into the water or, at worst, a twisted ankle, there’s a greater danger from the middle of July to the end of August. Just as Zion’s shuttle buses become jammed with passengers and the trails are crowded with day-trippers and visitors from around the world, torrential thunderstorms begin to pop up regularly in the mountains north of the park. Hikers in the Narrows report looking up past the canyon walls to see bright blue sky even as rain drenches the land twenty or thirty miles away. As the rain falls and the runoff from the desert and mountains swells the volume of the Virgin River, all that water flows into Zion Canyon.
Once inside, the volume of water becomes concentrated as it squeezes between the monolithic walls. The water level rises instantly, racing down the canyon at rates as high as four thousand cubic feet per second—and as the canyon becomes even narrower, the water level rises again. What may have begun as a few extra inches of water high in the mountains now speeds down the center of the canyon, reaching well over hikers’ heads and creating a deadly situation for people who have been lulled into a sense of security by the patches of clear blue sky they see above them. If they are caught on low ground, they may be swept away by the current’s force.
Because of Zion’s unique topography, hikers also may find themselves without the ability to climb to safety. Floodwaters cover all the riverbed sandbars and scraps of land at the bottom of the canyon, and walls scoured by centuries of such floods offer no ledges or even footholds to help people climb to a higher point on the rock face. Hikers, climbers, and canyoneering enthusiasts, including some lifelong experts, have found themselves trapped on a point too low for safety. Others manage to scramble up to a point above the water, remaining stranded on a ledge until the water recedes. This can take many hours, an uncomfortable situation for hikers who thought they were on a day trip and who did not pack enough extra food, dry clothing, and water to last into another day.
So on Monday afternoon, July 27, 1998, when 0.47 inches of rain fell at Zion National Park headquarters and the Lava Point area west of the Narrows received 0.37 inches, parties of hikers—fourteen people in all—became trapped overnight about two miles upriver from the Temple of Sinawava parking area. They managed to scramble to higher ground as the water level rose three feet in a matter of minutes, and as the flow increased from 110 cubic feet to 740 cubic feet per second, making wading in the roiling river impossible. They made makeshift camps, getting as comfortable as they could while keeping a close eye on the current for any sign that the depth might become passable once again.
That’s how the hikers spotted the body.
It floated by them at about 5:00 p.m., battered significantly by rocks it had encountered in the swift current. No medical expertise was required to determine that the person had most likely drowned in the flash flood.
Immediately seeing the need to retrieve this person’s remains, several of the hikers worked together to reach the body, bring it to a patch of ground, and secure it there. It remained in place until early Tuesday morning, when the river had returned to a manageable level and the hikers could make their way out of the canyon. They reported their find to the first ranger they could locate.
When Zion’s search and rescue squad entered the Narrows, it located the body where the hikers had secured it. Determining who the victim was, however, became a tricky process. “There wa
s no identification on the man, and we haven’t heard any reports about a missing person,” park spokesman Denny Davies told the Salt Lake Tribune. The recovery team ventured an educated guess that the man was in his forties, and that he weighed between 230 and 250 pounds. Washington County sheriff Glenwood Humphries noted that the body had taken a severe beating in the swiftly flowing current, making it that much harder to achieve a solid identification. Whoever this person was, he had not obtained a permit from the park to hike the canyon, and he had not made an advance reservation for a campsite. His identity was a complete mystery.
On Tuesday evening, however, park investigators found an unlocked vehicle parked in Zion Canyon with two wallets in it, and they matched one of the driver’s license photos with the unidentified body. They determined that the victim was twenty-seven-year-old Ramsey E. Algan of Long Beach, California. Two other hikers who had emerged from the canyon after the flash flood confirmed what seemed to be the case: Algan had been hiking with another man, and that man had not returned to his car either. Park search and rescue teams now had to face the fact that they had another hiker to find—and the chances were slim that they would find him alive.
On Wednesday, July 29, Acting Chief Ranger David Buccello coordinated the second search along the Virgin River, breaking the searchers into teams to explore five sectors of the park. He also engaged the assistance of Rocky Mountain Rescue Dogs from Salt Lake City. “The search dogs can be a great help in searching the debris piles left after such a flood,” Buccello said in a statement released by the National Park Service. South of the park, Washington County sheriff’s deputy Kurt Wright led search efforts on the chance that the second man’s body might have been carried downstream and beyond the park’s boundaries on the strong storm current.
On Wednesday morning, July 30, searchers discovered the body of the second man about a mile and a half upstream from where Algan’s body was first spotted. Paul Garcia, a thirty-one-year-old man from Paramount, California, was located in a debris pile where his body had snagged during the flash flood.
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