Death in Zion National Park

by Randi Minetor

  On the day that Don Orcutt became the first man to successfully climb the Great White Throne, he discovered that someone had been there before him.

  There atop the 6,744-foot white Navajo sandstone monolith on June 30, 1931, Orcutt found “a portion of a human skull, yellow and brittle with age,” the Iron County Record reported several weeks later. “In years gone by some unknown climber has scaled the cliffs of the Great White Throne in the park, but never returned to report the exploit.”

  With no other information on the hapless climber, the newspaper was left to speculate on the origin of the human artifact. “Perhaps in days forgotten some venturesome Indian, perhaps of the cliff dwelling nation, made his way to the top, but after reaching there feared to make the descent and remained, awaiting the rescue party which never came.”

  It’s as likely a story as any, as this skull is the only clue we have about a person who perished in what would become Zion National Park, probably hundreds of years before a system of national parks was ever conceived. We do know quite a bit about the man who found the artifact, however—and about the infamy he achieved not only for being the first to climb the Great White Throne, but for the fate that befell him shortly thereafter.

  A seasoned climbing veteran with uncommon experience and skill, twenty-four-year-old Orcutt scaled Mount Whitney—at the time the highest mountain in the United States, as Alaska was not yet a state, so Mt. Denali did not count as the country’s highest peak—as well as Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, and many other peaks in the High Sierras. His climb of the Great White Throne began at the floor of the canyon at 6:00 a.m. on June 30, and by 10:30 a.m. he signaled from the top that he had summited the peak successfully. “He is reported to have named this the hardest climb he had ever made,” the Iron County Record noted.

  The legendary climb was not without mishap. “Orcutt, who climbed barefoot”—yes, barefoot—“slipped once and slid 40 or 50 feet toward certain death,” the Garfield County News reported. “He stopped just before it was too late. Hugging a rock, he finally made his way out of danger.”

  Perhaps this shoeless predilection contributed to what happened to Orcutt just one month later. On July 28, 1931, he decided to climb another of Zion’s peaks, this one considered “not very dangerous” to seasoned climbers. He planned to scale Cathedral Mountain, making it a practice run before he attempted another first later in the summer: West Temple Mountain. No human being had summited West Temple at that point, so Orcutt set his sights on it.

  He left the canyon at 11:00 a.m. to begin his Cathedral ascent—and while climbing enthusiasts doubtless will want to know exactly which route he took up the mountain, this information does not appear in the reports available. What we do know is that he ascended the mountain by “easy stages,” and when he failed to return by late in the afternoon, park rangers knew that something had gone wrong.

  They soon found the badly mangled body of Don Orcutt about a mile and a half from the West Rim Trail. “Rangers estimated that he had fallen about 1,000 feet over the jagged slopes of the mountain,” the Iron County Record said. “His body was mangled almost beyond recognition when found.”

  Even in death, Orcutt managed to secure one more first for his permanent record: He was the first climber to die in Zion National Park, and only the second visitor to the park to die there as well (the story of the first, Albin Brooksby, is in chapter 9).

  A Step Too Far, a Jolt Too Sudden

  After Don Orcutt’s death, thirty-four years passed before another climber met his end at Zion—and this time, he had a close connection to the park. He was fifteen-year-old Ronald Hillery, the son of Allen R. Hillery, Zion park roads and trails foreman.

  On October 10, 1965, at about 1:00 p.m., Ron and his friend Steve Anderson, who was sixteen, were climbing at a small waterfall in Lodge Canyon behind the employee housing area, an activity that had kept the two boys and a group of friends busy on and off for several days. Anderson said that he and Ron were trying to retrieve a climbing piton and a rope from a ledge. “Ron had climbed up to unfasten the role from the peton [sic],” Anderson told the Associated Press. “He leaned out from the ledge . . . and the next thing I heard him scream ‘Steve’ and he fell.”

  Ron fell thirty feet, landing on his head among the rocks. He died two hours later in a St. George hospital of massive internal injuries.

  It was 1992 before another climber perished in the park. David Faulkner Bryant, an assistant attorney general for the State of Utah, planned a day of canyoneering on October 10 with two friends in the Subway portion of North Creek. The group tied their rope to a small pinion pine tree on the edge of the canyon, and Bryant was the last to rappel down the canyon wall at about 3:15 p.m. On the way, however, he slipped briefly and caught himself with the rope, and the shock to the line pulled the tree out of the ground by the roots. Bryant fell backward about thirty feet and landed hard on the rocks below.

  More than a dozen other climbers and hikers witnessed his fall, including a doctor who rushed to Bryant’s side. He quickly determined that Bryant was not breathing, but he had a pulse, so the doctor went to work to attempt to save him. The doctor used the handle of a plastic milk bottle to create an airway and intubated the unfortunate man, beginning ventilations as one of Bryant’s companions hiked out of the Subway to get help.

  Given the remoteness of the Subway, it took the hiker more than an hour to reach a phone to call 911. Park rangers received the dispatch call at 4:45 p.m. and immediately contacted Nellis Air Force Base to request a helicopter. Nearly four hours later, at 8:30 p.m., Bryant finally arrived at a hospital in St. George, but his injuries were too severe to survive. He passed away shortly thereafter.

  Five more years passed before another climber made a fatal error in Zion. This time, it was John Christensen’s fall off of Angels Landing, a story told in chapter 3.

  Deadly Adventures

  The origins of canyoneering in Utah—exploring canyons by hiking, wading, swimming, rock climbing, and rappelling—stretch back to the days of the Anasazi people, with European-descended explorers accelerating the pace in the 1800s as they “discovered” the canyon lands in this territory. Not until the mid- to late twentieth century did it become a popular sport with the most adventurous visitors to Zion and other canyon parks and recreation areas. With advances in the safety, usability, and availability of the required technical gear and the explosion of information made available online, the sport’s popularity accelerated . . . and with it, the number of fatalities in Zion grew.

  Some of these came about through nothing more than bad luck, a person standing in the wrong place at precisely the right time. Twenty-year-old Sasha Simpson, for example, died in January 1999 while standing still. She was waiting on a ledge on the Mountain of the Sun mountaineering route, near the end of the route at Falling Water Hanging Garden Cliffs, while another in her party freed a rope that was stuck in a crevice. Suddenly a rock gave way above her. She swerved to avoid being hit by the rock and lost her balance, tumbling 150 feet down the cliff face and sustaining fatal head injuries.

  Even highly skilled canyoneers can find themselves in deadly trouble. On September 6, 2003, rescue teams at Zion faced the chilling task of bringing a friend out of the park after he fell from a wall in Behunin Canyon. Christopher Frankewicz of Springdale, an experienced and skilled climber and canyoneer, attempted a one-day descent through the canyon—a task that normally takes about eight hours, according to the park’s morning report the following day. When friends reported to rangers that he had not returned by the evening of September 5, a search and rescue team set out early the following morning to find him. “Frankewicz’s body was found just after noon at the base of one of the rappels in the middle of the canyon,” the report said. “It appears that he fell 60 to 80 feet while attempting to locate the rappel station.”

  In the case of Roselan “Ross” Tamin, a thirty-five-year-old visitor from
Bournemouth, England, traveling with his lifelong friend Richard Connors, the accident that ended his life on May 21, 2002, came about because of a knot that did not hold.

  The two had been on the road in the United States for several weeks, exploring a number of national parks and other points of interest, and they planned a climb of the Spaceshot, “an area popular for rappelling in the park,” according to the Spectrum, the St. George newspaper. Spaceshot is on the east side of Zion Canyon, between the Temple of Sinawava and Big Bend, not far from the road. The two men cut their climb short when they noticed storm clouds forming, deciding instead to rappel back to the bottom.

  “The two were on the face of the mountain when apparently the ropes of the victim’s line failed,” said Washington County sheriff Kirk Smith to Spectrum reporter Patrice St. Germain. “There was a boulder in between the two and the friend heard the victim scream and by the time he got past the boulder, he saw his partner was gone.”

  Tamin fell about 180 feet to the rocky surface below.

  Another visitor heard Connors yelling for help, flagged down a shuttle bus driver, and told the driver to call for emergency assistance. “Dispatch received the call for help at approximately 10 a.m.,” the Spectrum said. “Park rangers were dispatched to the scene and found Tamin with no detectable signs of life.”

  What exactly had happened to Tamin remained a mystery to the many canyoneering enthusiasts across the country who heard about the accident. Had his rope actually failed in some catastrophic way? Had one of the two men bungled a knot? What innocent mistake had the visitors from England made—and how could other climbers avoid making the same error?

  After weeks of speculation on canyoneering newsgroups and discussion boards, Connors himself demonstrated an uncommon generosity to the global canyoneering community by posting on June 14, 2002, a detailed account of the steps that led up to his friend’s death, on the uk.rec.climbing newsgroup. (Connors uses the word abseil, which is another word for rappel.)

  I got to the top of pitch 4 as Ross arrived at the top of pitch 3. Ross had got some two-way radios earlier on the trip and we chatted on the radio: the weather forecast had been slowly deteriorating for the last 3 days, today was 50% chance of afternoon rain, there were a lot of gloomy clouds brewing above us, the sandstone is all bad in the wet, we were not super fast aid climbers . . . A brief spot of rain actually hit us and we decided to bail. I pulled up the 9mm rope, tied it to the yellow, stripped the anchor and descended to the top of pitch 3. Meantime Ross had been untying the green from this anchor and getting ready to set up a double-rope abseil. I got down to him, chucked him the end of the yellow to tie to the green and started pulling the ropes down from above.

  Ross headed off down to the big sandy ledge as I coiled the 9mm and put it on my back. He radioed me to say “rope free” and I headed down. I arrived on the big sandy ledge about 10-15ft away from the anchor—Ross was off to my left, already clipped into the anchor and sorting out the blue rope, ready to set up the last abseil. I chucked the loose end of the yellow to Ross and started pulling the ropes from above. I was unclipped at this point—being a very bad boy, even though it was a huge ledge. This was actually the only thing that struck me as unsafe about our whole day. As the knot came down, I stopped and untied it to free the yellow, which was now all tangled up in plants and rocks on the ledge. Ross fed it over the edge as I untangled it from everything on the ledge. I started pulling the green down as Ross sorted himself out over at the anchor. I was coiling the green rope as Ross called over to say “see you at the bottom in a few minutes,” he saw me coiling the green and offered to carry it, since I had the 9mm already on my back, but he already had our daysack on so I said I was fine taking it down. I turned to just finish up coiling the green and at that moment he fell.

  I rushed over and there was nothing there—our ropes had gone, Ross had gone, the anchor was fine, untouched. Everything floated for a moment, slipped sideways and turned unreal—then I started shouting . . . I knew I had to get down in case by some impossible chance there was something I could do to help him. I was yelling down to the road and got someone’s attention, they flagged down one of the shuttle buses and shouted that help was coming. I had the 55m green and the 50mx9mm ropes with me. I couldn’t get to the ground in one go but I knew there was another anchor (top of the Alpine Start for those that know it) that I would be able to reach. I set up the double rope abseil and set off down. The ropes tangled around everything—it was a complete shambles. I saw the rangers and the ambulance arrive; the rangers were racing up the hill to Ross. I set up the second abseil, it was all taking so long . . . as I reached the ground one of the rangers came over to tell me what I already knew.

  Some stuff that I do know—Ross was found with the two ropes correctly through his belay device. The ropes extended about 10 feet “above” him (the other 190 feet being “below” his belay device) and the ends were not tied together. Throughout this trip we had always been tying ropes together using a fig-eight knot . . . The only other abseil Ross set up that same day (from top of pitch 3 down to the big ledge) he had used the fig-eight knot with no back up knot on the tails. The knot was neat, I don’t remember exactly how long the tails were but they didn’t cause me a second glance. I could not see exactly what Ross was setting up on that last abseil—he was 10 ft or so to my left and was sitting (while clipped in) so that he obscured my view of the anchor.

  The important bit—Some guys that were helping me out played around in their yard with this fig-eight method, tying it and trying to pull the knot apart. They found some worrying things. The way the ropes pull on this knot on a double-rope abseil deforms the knot badly. If the knot is not perfectly “dressed,” in particular if there is a single slack loop anywhere on the fig-eight, they could pull the knot through even with 6 INCHES of tails, just pulling the ropes apart as happens naturally on an abseil. 6 inches of tails is NOT ENOUGH. If you use this knot, tie a back up knot and leave LONG tails. It scares me to think that I could have innocently/ignorantly made this same catastrophic mistake.

  Connors went on to express his sorrow at losing his friend, and added, “The only other thing I want to say here is that the rangers at Zion were incredible; the way they dealt with the incident, the diligence of their investigation and the compassion that they showed me . . . I have only praise for everything they did. I was overwhelmed by the generosity of so many other people in Springdale—it’s a small town of wonderful people. Despite everything, I have some very fond memories of Zion and the people I met. It is a beautiful place—you should go there and climb those amazing walls.”

  Death by Technicality

  Canyoneering and climbing are highly technical sports, activities in which participants wager their lives against their own ability to rig their equipment properly. Most accidents—at least in Zion—take place not because the equipment itself failed, but because of a second’s worth of slip-up, a rope run through an incorrectly blocked carabiner or a knot that lacks enough tail for safety under load. Sometimes canyoneers run out of daylight before they finish a route, working in the dark to make the last descent. Others simply fall off a ledge.

  At forty-eight years old, Keith Biedermann of Garden Grove, California, had climbed up and rappelled down many walls, often in the company of others who shared his love of the experience. “I’ve been told [Biedermann] was a dedicated and serious hiker or mountaineer type,” Lieutenant Jake Adams of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office told reporter Ryan Hammill at the Orange County Register.

  On June 4, 2007, Biedermann and two friends obtained the proper permit to explore Heaps Canyon, a popular canyoneering route near Emerald Pools, described by Tom Jones in his online Utah Canyoneering Guide as “a truly wonderful canyon, but it is also BIG. Deep inside the mountain, it is dark, wet, sinuous, and moody . . . Heaps saves the best for last—a series of raps culminating in a 280-foot free-hanging the whole way rappel, with the
wall at least 50 feet away. AWESOME, and something you want to be alert for.”

  At the end of a day of exploring the canyon, Biedermann and his friends began the lengthy process of making the final 280-foot rappel. The first two went down carefully and landed without any serious mishaps. Biedermann began his rappel with a companion holding the belaying rope as he descended . . . and the rope suddenly went slack. Biedermann fell the remaining 260 feet to his death.

  Over the course of the investigation, rangers and Biedermann’s companions put together a working theory of the accident’s cause, one involving the connection at the top of the rope (the “locking biner”) slipping through the carabiner that was supposed to hold it in place. The deadly rappel took place between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m., and while the men all had headlamps, the combination of fatigue, darkness, and trepidation about making the long, free-hanging descent all certainly could have contributed to the error that ended Biedermann’s life.

  An equipment issue contributed to the death of thirty-four-year-old James Martin Welton on October 17, 2008, during his ascent of Touchstone, a thousand-foot wall across the canyon from Angels Landing. Welton, who came from Durango, Colorado, had climbed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park earlier that year, and his friends, family, and fellow climbers considered him an experienced climber with advanced skills. On this fall evening in Zion, he and two friends—Matt Tuttle of Kamas, Utah, and Robert Hooker of Elko, Nevada—had made it up the first three hundred feet of the climb and expected to spend the night on the cliff face on port-a-ledges—cots attached to the rock wall some distance above them.

  Welton was climbing a rope using a mechanical ascender (also called a jumar), according to the park’s morning report the day after the accident. This device slides freely in one direction—up the rope—and stops by gripping the rope when pulled in the opposite direction. The climber attaches the ascender to his or her harness before clipping it onto the rope, and then deploys the device’s locking mechanism to keep it from sliding off the end of the rope.