Death in Zion National Park

by Randi Minetor

  At 9:00 p.m. rangers went to the canyoneers’ vehicles again to see if they had made it back. Nothing appeared to be touched—there was no evidence that they had returned from the canyon.

  “In good conditions, the first part of Keyhole can be escaped by scrambling up rock faces or leaving the canyon at an opening near the midway point,” the Los Angeles Times explained. “But after the route descends deeper—requiring hikers to rappel—there is no turning back until the canyon opens up near Clear Creek and Highway 9.” In addition, the three hikers told rangers that the group of seven shared a single rope. This meant that if they had attempted to turn back, they would need to climb out of the canyon one at a time, making any means of escape a slow and deliberate process.

  There was no question that this would not be a rescue operation. Park spokesman David Eaker told the Daily Mail that “the flooding likely rushed over their heads in moments and carried them miles downstream . . . ‘It would be just like a drain, it just funnels down in there very quickly, very fast.’”

  On Tuesday morning, September 15, the search and recovery operation began at 7:00 a.m. The water levels remained high in Keyhole Canyon, but searchers followed the canyon’s course and peered into it from several locations that were accessible from its rim. They called out for the missing canyoneers but received no response. Walking downstream beyond the mouth of the canyon, they paced along the length of Clear Creek to see if any evidence of the hikers had washed into more open country.

  At 1:30 p.m., nearly twenty-four hours after the group entered Keyhole, searchers sorting through debris piles discovered the body of Steve Arthur in Clear Creek. Further searching along the creek revealed Muku Reynolds’s body at about 4:15 p.m., and Don Teichner’s remains in the drainage into Pine Creek at 5:15 p.m.

  Meanwhile, between 2:30 and 3:00 p.m., Kaden Anderson, who worked as a canyoneering guide for a local resort, and two friends, newlyweds India and Jay Piacitelli, were about to make the final rappel into Keyhole Canyon on the couple’s first-ever canyoneering outing. When they reached the ledge before the third rappel, they discovered a rope hanging down from the ledge to the bottom of the canyon, and they could just see through the dimness that something stuck out of the water below. The shape looked enough like a foot with a shoe on it that it gave all of them pause. “We probably sat there for ten or fifteen minutes,” Anderson told Schaffer of Outside magazine. “Then I said, ‘I’m going to run down and see what’s going on.’” He rappelled to the bottom and landed in a muddy pool, and discovered that the shoe he could see was indeed attached to a leg, and the leg to a body. The body turned out to be Gary Favela.

  Water levels and weather continued to make the search difficult over the next two days, but more than sixty search and rescue personnel continued in spite of the conditions. On Wednesday, September 16, searchers using cadaver dogs and sifting through piles of driftwood, branches, rocks, and mud found Robin Brum and Mark MacKenzie some distance apart in the Pine Creek drainage. The body of Linda Arthur—the last of the seven—came to light Thursday morning in Pine Creek Canyon; she had traveled the farthest of all on the storm-driven current.

  “The most innocuous slot in Zion had produced the worst canyoneering disaster in American history and the worst accident of any kind in Zion’s 97 years,” wrote Schaffer. “The seven people who died in Keyhole Canyon were experienced hikers. Most of them were not, however, technical canyoneers, well versed in rappelling techniques.” This had never been a life-threatening issue in Keyhole Canyon before, but as the number of search and rescue missions in Zion climbs each year—up as much as 29 percent in 2015—the slot canyons, sheer walls, and summits all become areas of scrutiny. Schaffer summed it up: “The numbers suggest that there’s something deceptively benign about the desert’s erratic mix of heat, cold, and dryness, interspersed with electrified downpours, that can catch people by surprise.”

  In the aftermath of the deadliest day in Zion’s history, park officials have begun an examination of the events that led to the deaths in Keyhole Canyon, and the steps the park may take to change its own policies regarding access to canyons, warning systems to reach backcountry hikers, and assessment of individuals’ skills before they take on the riskiest canyoneering and climbing challenges in the park. The outcome may include stricter rules around issuing permits, and the requirement that all members of a party hear weather warnings from rangers or watch a video on the potential hazards before undertaking risky ventures.

  When Easy Trails Turn Deadly

  Flash floods can have an effect on safety well beyond the depths of slot canyons. In a heavy rain, water pours down over the high cliffs on every side of Zion Canyon, turning the desert setting into a slippery, sloshy mess and transforming slickrock surfaces into frictionless slides. Waterfalls appear as trickles and expand until they become long, high, gushing cascades. Creek tributaries overflow their banks, and the roaring streams fill with the debris they gather as they race along their widened course.

  These are the conditions that ten-year-old Michael Muñoz of Las Vegas, Nevada, and his family encountered on May 10, 2001, when a spring storm brought heavy rain and hail to the Canyon Overlook Trail.

  On any dry day Canyon Overlook provides a family-friendly way to see some of the most spectacular views of the park, beginning just east of the Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel and stretching for half a mile along the edge of Pine Creek Canyon. Hikers enjoy expansive views of the Switchbacks, the Beehives, East and West Temple, the Streaked Wall, and Towers of the Virgin, all icons in the Zion skyline. “There are lots of hoodoos and wild flowers along the trail that make it fun for kids, but keep your children close to you and safe while hiking in Zion,” cautions blogger Tanya Milligan, who writes ZionNational-Park.com, a detailed trip-planning website. The trail features some steep drop-offs that add a level of daring and excitement for children, but the fairly wide path generally provides the required room to pass these safely.

  The Muñoz family walked the half mile to the extraordinary view, and they were on their way back to the parking area when the rain started. The sudden storm turned the trail into a perilous mess. As if someone had overturned a massive pail, rainwater sluiced through a side canyon and over the trail surface—and to a pair of young boys, wading through this pop-up stream must have looked like a grand adventure. They did not realize that the flow could be powerful enough to knock Michael and his younger brother off of the path and over the side of the canyon.

  The younger boy managed to grab onto a tree and hold fast until other hikers rescued him. Michael was not so lucky. He tumbled down 250 feet of slope—and then another 150 feet straight down, into the slot canyon formed by Pine Creek.

  Park dispatch received the emergency call just after 6:00 p.m., and the search and rescue team responded immediately. A ranger who was also a medic rappelled into the canyon and located Michael, but he discovered exactly what he must have expected: The boy had not survived the long, tumbling fall. The effort to bring the boy’s body out of the canyon slowed down when more rain brought another flash flood, but rangers finally completed the dismal job around 11:00 p.m., five hours after the accident occurred.

  In a national park with so many fascinating geologic formations and so much dry weather, it can be hard for visitors to comprehend the dangers that can arise when the forecast calls for rain. Zion can change in an instant from a beckoning wilderness to a deadly landscape just by adding water—and hours later, the danger disappears and the trails, canyons, and creek walks become manageable once again. In this park as in so many other undeveloped areas, safety depends not only on skill, training, and preparation, but on timing as well.

  Chapter 3

  Crossing the Neck: Angels Landing

  Towering 1,488 feet above the floor of Zion Canyon, Angels Landing provides a 270-degree view of the canyon that no other peak in the park can match. Once known as the Temple of Aeolus, the shape of this spi
re and the difficult journey required to reach it must have harkened back to a story in the travels of Odysseus, who came upon a floating island known as Aeolia and enjoyed the hospitality of its namesake, the son of Hippotes. When Odysseus and his sailors left the island, Aeolus provided them with a west wind to speed their journey home, and a bag containing winds from three other directions should they require additional assistance. Indeed, those who have stood at the top of this peak have felt the winds from all directions, making the original analogy to Greek mythology quite appropriate.

  How the tower’s name changed to Angels Landing is the stuff of legend as well. The story goes that in 1916, Frederick Vining Fisher, a Methodist minister from Ogden, Utah, saw the high point from below and exclaimed to his friend and colleague Claud Hirschi, “Only an angel could land on it!” (Fisher and Hirschi named several landmarks in the park, including the Great White Throne.) The name stuck, and visitors from that point forward became fascinated with the option of standing at the top of Angels Landing—a spot reserved only for the winged divine.

  In 1926, construction of the trail we still use to reach the summit today became the focus of two park service employees, Thomas Chalmers Vint and Walter Ruesch. Visitors begin the hike using the paved West Rim Trail, and then take the branch that leads gradually upward through a feat of engineering named for Ruesch: Walter’s Wiggles. This zigzagging stack of twenty-one switchbacks, each outlined with a low brick barrier, eases the elevation change as hikers make their way through Refrigerator Canyon to the first major viewpoint—the one officially named Scout Lookout.

  Colloquially, however, locals know this panoramic overlook by a droll nickname: Chicken-Out Point. Hikers can see not only half of the impressive Zion Canyon from this spot, but also what comes next. Ahead on the trail, a thick chain stretches upward along a slim sandstone fin less than six feet wide. On either side of this ridge, there’s a cliff and a sheer drop of more than one thousand feet to the canyon floor below. The chain provides the only handhold, swaying and bouncing as people move up the path to the peak on one side, and down the path to the relative safety at Scout Lookout on the other. (If you’d like to get a sense of what this part of the hike is like, you can take a virtual “eHike” on the park’s website at www.nps.gov/zion/learn/photosmultimedia/angels-landing-ehike.htm.)

  “One of the problems with the Angels Landing Trail is that it isn’t a trail at all, but a series of rock steps so narrow and precipitous that chains to hold onto it have been bolted into the rock face,” wrote Julie Sheer in a 2009 blog entry for the Los Angeles Times. “This isn’t entirely unusual: Think Half Dome [in Yosemite National Park], but instead of a continuous cable-assisted climb, picture narrow rocks barely large enough to stand on in spots—and large gaps between chains. And there are people hiking the trail in sandals, flip-flops and with young children in tow.”

  Many people take one look at the chain, the meager trail, and the clear air on either side of the ridge and shake their heads, deciding they have come far enough for their own satisfaction. There’s no shame in this. One of the most important elements in staying alive in the national parks is to recognize and acknowledge your own limits: Not everyone can hike every trail, nor should you if you know that you are prone to fear of heights, vertigo, or other issues that may cause you to freeze halfway along the ridge or lose your balance. “Angels Landing is one of the most exciting, intimidating, and famous trails in the National Park Service,” says Tom Jones in his online Utah Canyoneering Guide. “Many find the final ridge too much, and wait at the ‘Widow’s Tree’ for their companions to return from the summit.”

  Considering that the trail became accessible to most fearless hikers as far back as 1926, it’s remarkable that the first death from a fall off the trail did not occur until 1989—and what exactly happened to that young man has been shrouded in mystery ever since.

  The Bloody Backpack

  On Sunday, April 2, 1989, at about 11:00 a.m., a group of hikers walked into Zion park headquarters and handed the ranger there a backpack spattered with blood. They reported that they had discovered it on Angels Landing, at the peak—so whoever had left it behind had already crossed the ridge and made it to the final viewpoint.

  Rangers were immediately dispatched to the trail. When they arrived at the peak, they found a pool of blood at the summit and a trail of blood spots on the north edge, but they could not see a body from there. It took a helicopter to finally locate the owner of the backpack around 4:15 p.m.—a body lying on a ledge about 150 feet down the side of the sandstone pillar. A recovery crew removed the body the following day and discovered that the man had a large hole in his forehead, one that “could be a gunshot wound or could have resulted from injuries sustained in a fall,” according to Washington County medical investigator Al Boyack.

  “We’ve got a real mystery on our hands,” he told the Spokane Chronicle on Tuesday, April 4.

  Authorities were able to determine the man’s identity as the investigation continued. His driver’s license gave his name as Jeffrey Robert Dwyer, a twenty-eight-year-old resident of Sandpoint, Idaho, and they found that Dwyer was traveling with two other people on a seven-week trip through the western United States and Mexico. Dwyer had gone out on his own, without his friends, early Saturday afternoon, and they had not seen him since. Another hiker saw Dwyer alone later on Saturday.

  “There’s a lot of injury to the head,” Chief Ranger Bob Andrew told the media, “but what we’re concerned about is all the blood on the top of Angels Landing. We’re awaiting the autopsy to determine the cause of death. Right now we’re just calling it a fatality.”

  The results of the autopsy did nothing to solve the mystery, however. The examination showed that Dwyer died from “massive head injuries,” Washington County sheriff Glenwood Humphries told the media. He emphasized that investigators were “still awaiting the results of additional medical tests before ruling whether Dwyer’s death was accidental, a homicide or a suicide.”

  Andrew said that cause of death remained under investigation, adding, “There’s enough suspicion because of the amount of blood we found that we’ve ruled it a suspicious death.” Sheriff’s deputies also noted that they had found a half ounce of marijuana in Dwyer’s pocket, though no reports drew any conclusion from this.

  Remarkably, this was the last attention the media paid to this questionable death in the park. None of the local papers or the national wire services followed up to discover what conclusions these investigations may have confirmed.

  All suspicious deaths in national parks come under the auspices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I made a request under the Freedom of Information Act to see the file on the Dwyer death, and I was surprised at the response: There is no file on Jeffrey Robert Dwyer. The Washington County Sheriff’s Office responded to my request for information on the investigation as well, but the office’s files only go back to 1997. There’s no record of a continued investigation or the results.

  So what happened to Dwyer? Did he reach the summit, fall and hit his head, and roll off the cliff? Did someone strike him and run—and if so, to what end? Or did he purposely take his own life? No one knows. The case has long since gone cold, and the incident remains a mystery.

  Zion’s First Rappelling Accident

  Nearly eight years passed before another event on Angels Landing resulted in a death.

  On January 1, 1997, thirty-six-year-old John Michael Christensen decided to celebrate the new year with a solo climb of Angels Landing. A skilled climber, Christensen had all of the appropriate technical gear with him, and he chose to take the route known as the Prodigal Sun, one of the rock faces of the tall sandstone peak.

  While the Deseret News called this a “relatively easy route,” Prodigal Sun takes an unrelentingly vertical approach to the peak. It involves scaling sheer rock faces, scrambling through loose rock and dirt, finding footing over the lips of arches
and diagonal pitches, and belays from one anchor to the next along ledges less than a human foot wide. Some of the area’s lead climbers have set pitons to help others work their way up the rock face, but most consider this a two-day climb today, with the first day spent setting up the first three pitches and coming back down to camp. With this preparation completed, climbers can spend the second day “blasting” all the way up the wall to the top. The climb can take from dawn to dusk on a summer day, so with the shortened daylight on the first of the year, Christensen spent at least part of it climbing in the dark.

  That’s why no one saw Christensen climbing the peak, but investigators believe that he made it to the top without mishap. Once he stood at the Angels Landing viewpoint, he had two choices: He could take the long walk down the snow-covered path—the one used by day hikers to reach the landing the more conventional way—or he could go back down the way he came. The rappel back to the parking area probably looked more appealing to a man who had just conquered the rock face.

  The accident took place on the way down.

  When Christensen did not contact his family at the appointed time, his family reported to the park that he was missing. It took searchers only a short time to find his body at the base of the peak.

  “There’s no 100 percent certainty because there were no witnesses and it was in darkness,” National Park Service investigator David Buccello told reporters, but the ropes and rappel device Christensen was using when he fell indicated that he was on the descent. “The gear harnessed to the victim suggested he rappelled off the end of one of the two ropes he was using.”