Death in Zion National Park

by Randi Minetor

  Tammy set off to hike alone while Michael ran some errands. They made plans to meet up at the park later that afternoon.

  When Michael arrived at the park, Tammy was not back from her hike. As the afternoon wore on, he became more and more worried and finally went to the ranger station to report that she was late. “Then about an hour and a half after he got there, he heard from [park rangers] that a woman had fallen to her death,” Rick said.

  “The fall of approximately 1,000 feet occurred on the north side of the popular Angels Landing while Mrs. Grunig was hiking the popular route,” the park’s news release announced on November 30. “The fall was first reported by a 911 call from another hiker’s cell phone; St. George Police Dispatch Office received the call at approximately 2:10 p.m.” The park sent out a search and rescue team, who recovered Grunig’s body by 6:30 p.m.

  Five months later to the day, one more woman plunged to her death—but this time, the thousand-foot fall took place at Scout Lookout, before the hike across the neck. Park dispatch received a call at 4:20 p.m. on April 27, 2010, that the woman had fallen. She “was seen sitting on the edge of Scout Lookout,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported. “When she stood up . . . [she] lost her balance. She plummeted about 1,000 feet.”

  Search and rescue personnel located her body later that evening. When they recovered it the following morning, they found that she had no identification with her, so no positive identification could be made right away—and no one contacted the park looking for her.

  “Park rangers are looking for vehicles that have been left unattended and are investigating whether any guests staying in the park or in nearby Springdale had not checked out when they expected to in an effort to confirm the woman’s identity,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported on April 29.

  Their search eventually bore fruit. A local hotel reported that a female guest had not checked out on time, and that her belongings were still in her room. Police found her driver’s license in the room and matched the photo of the guest with the victim: she was Regine Milobedzki, age sixty-three, of Upland, California. Even with this information in hand, however, it still took law enforcement several days to locate and reach family members to notify them of the accident.

  It had been a rough week for staff and search teams at Zion. Just a few days before, two men—Daniel Chidester and Jesse Scaffidi, both twenty-three—planning to build a raft and float the Virgin River through the Narrows had died before they could attempt their feat. (You’ll find their story in chapter 1.)

  Angels Landing Today

  With a deadly fall every few months from 2007 to 2010, and a number of additional rescues that did not end in fatalities—including saving those who started across the slim fin and froze midcrossing—park officials knew that it was time to make Angels Landing safer for hikers.

  In the spring of 2011, the last half mile of the hike got a limited but effective safety makeover. “The park service installed more chains, which hikers can grip like a stairway railing as they walk,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported. “The park service also carved more steps in the rock.”

  Now a sign near the trailhead gives some hikers pause before they begin the crossing. It warns them that six people have died from falls on the trail since 2004. “The route is not recommended during high winds, storms, or if snow or ice is present,” the sign continues.

  The changes appear to be working. As of this writing, no one has died on Angels Landing since 2010.

  Chapter 4

  The Edge of Forever: Falls from High Places

  Eugene Cafferata, a nineteen-year-old from St. Louis, Missouri, had some exciting plans for the summer of 1930: He and his friend, John Faust, would accompany John’s mother, Rose, on a tour of the American West. Rose and Eugene’s mother, Christine Cafferata, had been classmates at St. Louis University years earlier, and when Christine’s husband died in 1922 and the family gave up the restaurant of which he was the proprietor, it became harder for them to take elaborate vacations.

  On Tuesday, July 8, Rose, John, and Eugene took a horseback ride through Zion Canyon and explored some of the trails. Eugene realized that he would be stiff and sore the next day from spending time on horseback if he didn’t take a walk before turning in that night. He bade his friends a good afternoon, said he would be back for dinner, and started up the trail to Emerald Pools, just a short distance from Zion Lodge.

  That was the last anyone saw of Eugene until two days later.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, the relatively easy Emerald Pools trail offered a compelling side trip, a steady but navigable climb up to the summit of neighboring Lady Mountain. “Today’s obscure route to the summit of this Zion landmark was once a popular and maintained trail, equipped with chains and other safety devices,” Tanya Milligan writes on her extensive website, ZionNational-Park.com. “Completed in 1924, this amazing route up the steep mountainside was the first trail constructed by the park leading to one of the rims.” The route featured more than 2,000 feet of cable and 1,400 carved steps, making it an adventurous climb for tourists looking for a challenging hike. (Today all the cables are gone and the route is no longer maintained, so this has become a technical route for experienced climbers.)

  Once he started up the Middle Emerald Pool trail, Eugene reached the trail to Lady Mountain and decided it was just strenuous enough for his post-ride stretch. He worked his way up the trail to the summit, climbing about 2,650 feet in just 1.9 miles until he reached the top at 6,945 feet. Here, no doubt, he enjoyed the view for a time before he signed the trail registry at about 7:30 p.m. and started back down the trail as the sun sank lower in the western sky.

  When Eugene did not return for dinner and still had not arrived well after dark, Rose and John alerted rangers that he was missing. “Rangers concentrated their search on the canyons and thick brush of the vicinity,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, “thinking he must have altered his plans after leaving the lodge.” When this produced no evidence of Eugene’s whereabouts, they widened their search. His signature in the trail registry, discovered two days later, became the first clue to what had happened to the young man.

  Now the searchers retraced their steps down the steep trail, and soon the fifteen-member team led by Chief Ranger Joseph Holley spotted something in a crevice not far from the top of the mountain. It became clear that Eugene had wandered off of the trail in the dark and fallen over the ledge, tumbling about fifty-five feet until he fell into the crack.

  The examination of his body determined that Eugene broke a rib in his fall, and the bone penetrated one of his lungs. “He probably lived for some time after the accident,” an account in the Ogden Standard-Examiner said.

  The Fatal Last Step

  No matter how much spectacle each viewpoint in Zion National Park delivers, someone in the park’s history has wished to see just a tiny bit more. The desire to get just a little closer to the edge of a cliff has proved fatal for at least sixteen people, including Eugene Cafferata, making a slightly more expansive look downward or outward—or a carelessly placed footfall—the last act in their lives.

  All of the fifty-nine national parks have established trails, many of which feature barriers, guardrails, fences, or railings to keep people on the right side of safety. In Zion many of the most frequented trails have no such divisions between hikers or climbers and clear air. It’s up to the visitor, then, to acknowledge that the park has placed its maintained trails along potentially hazardous routes, and that staying on these routes, while not a perfect guarantee of safety, certainly improves the odds of surviving the experience.

  Zion features a number of trails that follow the top edge of high sandstone walls or narrow ledges carved by millions of years of weather and erosion. Hiking these can be an exhilarating experience, both because of the stunning formations and landscapes that surround the trail, and because of the potential for danger just a few f
eet or even inches away. This is a park that informs the visitor: We know you’re a responsible adult, and that you respect the limited boundaries we’ve set for you. Now, take it from here. Keep an eye on your children so they don’t wander too close to the edge. Watch your own steps and be sure you’re in the safest zone.

  Not all visitors understand their personal role in protecting their own lives, however, and some who cross the line do not survive. Such was the case with Lane Kelton Cottrell, a seventeen-year-old employee of the park company who worked in the kitchen at Zion Lodge. Cottrell went hiking in the vicinity of the Great White Throne trail with two companions on September 4, 1951. They headed up Mountain of the Sun and reached the summit, and were on their way back down when Cottrell decided that he wanted to take his time down the route instead of keeping up with his friends. The other two went on ahead, assuming that Cottrell would meet them at the lodge later that evening.

  When Cottrell was not back by dark, the two other hikers contacted rangers. Their ten-hour search through the night finally revealed that Cottrell had fallen off a ledge when he strayed from the trail. He fell forty feet into a small canyon between Mountain of the Sun and the neighboring Deer Trap Mountain, where he remained wedged 1,500 feet above the canyon floor until the search team found him at about 6:00 a.m. on September 5. Eerily, Cottrell’s watch had stopped at 8:10 p.m., roughly the time that he had most likely perished from the fall.

  Introduction to Slickrock

  If you’ve never hiked in Utah, the concept of slickrock may conjure up images of wet boulders in a streambed or vertical rock faces worn smooth by centuries of weather events. In sandstone country, slickrock isn’t actually slick at all in dry conditions—in fact, its surface creates enough friction to feel like coarse, sixty-grit sandpaper against palms and knees. A slickrock trail can offer fairly stable hiking and technical work in the driest seasons, making otherwise challenging trails seem a little easier than expected.

  When the summer rains arrive, however, moss can take hold on horizontal sandstone surfaces, turning otherwise rough rock into a surface as slippery as ice. This is what caused Kelly Hilton, a seventeen-year-old boy from Murray, Utah, to slide off the trail and 125 feet down into the canyon on August 5, 1959.

  Hilton was the third cook at the Zion Park Inn (now Zion Lodge) that summer, and he would have been a senior at Granite High School in Murray that fall. The group with whom he was hiking—including coworkers Robert Browning, seventeen, and Jimmy Iverson, fifteen, and Zion Park Inn manager Theron Toogood—chose Natural Bridge Canyon as their target destination. Instead of taking the well-established route that began near the entrance to the Zion-Mt. Carmel Tunnel, however, the boys chose an abandoned trail near the park’s south entrance, one that had not been maintained since the 1930s. Back then, park management had fastened rope ladders to the rock so that climbers could pull themselves up the vertical rock faces and over steep ledges. The ladders had long since been removed.

  The four hikers left Zion Park Inn at 4:00 a.m. to begin their hike. At about 7:10 a.m. Browning and Iverson heard something up ahead—a cry for help, and a rush of falling gravel. “I heard him slip and thought it was a rock falling,” Browning told United Press International. “Then I saw Kelly flying through the air. I heard him moan once as he hit the first time. Then we lost sight of him.”

  They rounded the next bend and saw “a pair of loose-fitting loafers and a place where the moss had been scraped from a rock,” as Frank Jensen of the Salt Lake Tribune reported on August 6. Kelly Hilton was nowhere in sight, and the thick brush below the ledge made it impossible to see where he had gone.

  Toogood ran for help as the boys began searching for their friend. He returned with a search team including Chief Ranger Fred Brueck, who lowered himself into the gorge on a rope and found Hilton in minutes. “The youth was lying with his head twisted under his chest,” Jensen reported. “The body had fallen over a vertical 75-foot cliff and rolled another 50 feet. He apparently had landed on his head, dying instantly.”

  Rangers recovered the body and brought it out of the gorge at 1:50 p.m.

  When Children Fall

  Eleven-year-old Dana Harrison of Logan, Utah, probably felt fairly confident on his way up the Lady Mountain trail on June 21, 1962, enough so that he left his father, Thede Harrison, and his two older brothers, Max and Richard, to head back to the family camp on his own. What exactly happened next will never be known, but when his brothers and father returned to camp after their hike, at about 12:30 p.m., and discovered that Dana had not arrived, they went back up the trail to try to find him. It was only when their efforts failed that they alerted park rangers to the fifth grader’s disappearance. By then it was 4:00 p.m.

  Dana had fallen about fifty feet down a rock cliff at about noon and had survived, although he was unconscious—so no cries for help alerted the thirty-member search and rescue crews to his location. Even so, the teams located Dana at about 7:00 p.m., less than three hours after their efforts began. The boy had already lain unconscious on the mountain for about seven hours, and it took another five hours for the skilled crew to reach him at the base of Lady Mountain, secure him to a stretcher, and carry him out of the remote area over steep, rocky terrain. They discovered that he had significant head injuries, including a crushed skull, but he was breathing—a sign of hope.

  Once he realized the boy was alive, Chief Ranger James Felton contacted Dr. Garth Last in Hurricane, about fifty miles south of the park, to meet the rescue team at Lady Mountain with an ambulance. It was well past midnight when Dr. Last had his first opportunity to examine Dana and administer first aid. “The boy survived nearly fourteen hours from the time of the fall until he was discovered and carried by litter down the steep mountain,” the Star Valley Independent told readers. “But he died as the rescue party reached the base of the mountain and the ambulance. Oxygen and respiration equipment failed to revive him.”

  Almost six years passed before another young child met his fate in a fall, but this one took place on a trail not too far distant. On March 3, 1968, Robert Casalou and his friend Gerald Gifford, both of whom were thirteen and both visiting from North Las Vegas, set out on the Emerald Pools trail to make it all the way to the top. When they reached Upper Emerald Pool, they could enjoy the sight of an eighty-foot waterfall swelled with late winter snowmelt, and at least partially encased in huge columns and formations of solid ice.

  At about 2:00 p.m., they came to a ledge near the falls and sat down to take in the view. Casalou inched closer for an even better look, forgetting in that moment that the sandy surface would act as a glide against rocks wet with spray from the roaring falls. Momentum took him, and he plunged over the side of the ledge.

  Gifford, stricken with panic, ran the entire one and one-quarter miles to the trailhead near Zion Lodge. He flagged down a tourist in a car, who took him to the park ranger station to get help. Chief Ranger Robert Peterson led the recovery team up the trail to Upper Emerald Pool, but they knew what they would find there. They managed to bring out Casalou’s body by 3:00 p.m.

  In the Blink of an Eye

  Norman Chin, a fifty-four-year-old geologist from Fullerton, California, came to Zion on his own in September 1969 and chose to hike the East Rim Trail on a pleasant Monday, September 22. No one saw him fall, but someone—presumably a family member—alerted rangers that he had gone missing. Three days later, on September 25, his body was spotted 1,200 feet below on the floor of the canyon. The best guess anyone can offer is that Chin slipped and fell while taking photographs of the astonishing rock formations around him.

  When Steven Lee Miller fell from a cliff in the park on August 9, 1973, the incident also passed quietly and without fanfare. Miller, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, was camping in the park when he fell—and the media did not even note the location of the accident.

  Details are equally vague for a twenty-year-old Idaho State Universi
ty geology student named David Bourne, who camped with two friends at a backcountry site in the park with what district ranger Tony Bonanno described to the Associated Press as “a very exposed rim.” Bourne fell to his death, probably in the middle of the night on March 16, 1978, tumbling 180 feet until he landed on a ledge. Whether he left the camp to relieve himself, rolled over the ledge in his sleep, or actually went wandering in the dark are unknown, but the medical examiner in Salt Lake City determined that Bourne died between midnight and 10:00 a.m. that morning. His two companions discovered that he was missing and peered over the cliff, spotting his body far below.

  “In terms of recovery, it’s fortunate he landed where he did—on a ledge,” Bonanno continued. Otherwise, recovery of his body might have been impossible in the inaccessible canyon country far below the campsite.

  In the case of Thomas Brereton, author of the book Exploring the Backcountry of Zion National Park: Off-Trail Routes, death came to the forty-two-year-old veteran hiker as a case of grave misfortune. He was hiking the southwest side of the West Temple (some accounts say Mount Kinesava) on April 13, 1979, when the rocks on which he was standing simply fell out from under him. He plummeted with the falling rocks. Some experienced hikers in this area believe that he stood on wet sandstone, which will crumble when saturated.

  Nineteen-year-old John Russell, a student at Dixie College, intended to traverse the edge of a cliff at Middle Emerald Pool on October 16, 1983, when he stumbled and fell ninety feet into the gorge. Park rangers and a doctor were on the scene in short order, but they could do nothing for the young man.