Death in Zion National Park

by Randi Minetor

  His brother, Carl, told Van Leuven and Buhay that Eric had tried this particular route—following a series of cracks in the Navajo sandstone—three times since 2013, but he struggled to link all the moves.

  Information Van Leuven and Buhay gathered from the family and from Zion rangers did not fill in the blanks. “Zion National Park officials aren’t certain which pitch he fell from,” they noted. “Officials said his single rope was attached to the anchor with clove hitches on opposed carabiners. Two slings were around his torso, a few cams and nuts were on his harness, and his Grigri was clipped to his belay loop with a locking carabiner. The Grigri had no obvious damage, his 9.8mm 70m rope had no noticeable damage and his hands did not show signs of rope burn.”

  The only other clue: There was no knot tied on the bottom end of his rope. Experts finally came to the conclusion that Klimt had become detached from his self-belay system.

  “He was not wearing a helmet,” the Alpinist writers added, a refrain that had become common in twenty-first century stories of climbing accidents and deaths.

  Klimt was working in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the months before the accident, using his climbing skills in the inspection, maintenance, and construction industry as a rope access technician. Finding this not as stable a work situation as he needed, he planned to move to Terrebonne, Oregon, where he had lived the previous fall. He had uncommon skill as a high school math teacher as well. His brother Carl told the Alpinist writers, “He loved the beauty and symmetry of math [and] nature.”

  For a Moment of Flight

  For Amber Bellows and her husband of two weeks, Clayton Butler, risky sports were central to their relationship.

  They met at a skydiving facility in Tooele, Utah, in 2011, where Bellows had come to take her first course in jumping out of a plane. She and Butler dated for three years and married in late January 2014, completing their special day with a BASE jump: They leapt from their hotel room on the twenty-seventh floor of the MGM Signature in Las Vegas, opening parachutes almost immediately after stepping off the balcony into clear air. They landed safely (albeit dramatically) on a city street, as they had in all the jumps they had made over the previous three years.

  Their luck ran out two weeks later.

  A BASE jump is a leap from a stationary structure or object (the acronym stands for Building, Antenna, Span—such as a bridge—or Earth, including cliffs and peaks). A successful jump involves a brief, intensely thrilling free fall and an almost immediate deployment of a parachute—a critically important factor, because a BASE jumper is much closer to the ground than a skydiver, who has thousands of feet of air in which a parachute can inflate. Jumping from the balcony of a Las Vegas hotel room, for example, meant that Bellows and Butler were only three hundred feet or so off the ground, so their parachutes had to deploy and inflate in the first second or two of their fall.

  On February 8, 2014, the newlyweds hiked to the top of Mount Kinesava—a strenuous four-and-a-half-mile trek to the top of the 7,276-foot peak, which may have taken the couple as long as nine hours—and prepared to make their jump off of the peak’s east side. The position provided them with about two thousand feet for their free fall, giving them precious seconds of plummeting descent before they deployed their parachutes and floated safely to the canyon floor.

  Bellows leaped first, and Butler followed an instant later. In seconds he knew that his wife’s parachute had failed to open, but he could not reach her to attempt to save her. He saw her plunge into the rocky canyon.

  Butler landed safely and had no choice but to hike out of the remote backcountry for help. It was 6:30 p.m. before he could notify park officials of the accident.

  Park rangers knew that the mission to bring the twenty-eight-year-old woman out of the backcountry would be one of recovery rather than rescue, and that a helicopter would be required to locate her body. They contacted Grand Canyon National Park for use of the larger park’s helicopter and crew, and flew over the backcountry at the base of Mount Kinesava to locate Bellows’s body in the snow-covered canyon. Once they knew the extent of the challenges involved, they planned a short-haul operation—suspending two rangers beneath the helicopter until they reached the young woman, so they could retrieve and secure the body and carry her out to a waiting ambulance.

  Then the park service handed Clayton Butler a notice of violation for BASE jumping in the park—which came with the possibility of a $5,000 fine and six months in jail. Two weeks later, federal prosecutors thought better of this and dismissed the charge. “To be sure, BASE jumping in Zion National Park is unlawful, and this tragic BASE jumping accident underscores some of the reasoning behind the regulations which prohibit such conduct in Zion National Park,” said Melodyie Rydatch, spokeswoman for US attorney David Barlow. “Nevertheless, the interests of justice do not warrant prosecution of Mr. Butler.”

  “BASE jumping is so dangerous, even for those that are experienced, like Amber Bellows,” acting park superintendent Jim Milestone told the St. George News. “That is one of the reasons it is not allowed in the park.”

  The danger is an issue, but it’s not the main reason that the national parks do not permit BASE jumping and wingsuit jumping, a form of the sport that involves wearing a suit with fabric between the legs and under the arms to allow the jumper to soar like a flying squirrel. Since 1965 the Code of Federal Regulations has contained a section that bans parachuting from an aircraft, structure, or natural feature into a national park. The original spirit of the law was meant to prevent aerial delivery of cargo or people into the parks, but the National Park Service prohibits BASE jumping under this statute.

  BASE jumpers say that this law forces them to jump at dusk and in other low-light situations to avoid detection by rangers, increasing the danger by obscuring their view of obstacles they may encounter between the jumper and the ground. “As the sun sets, shadows move over the land very rapidly,” said BASE jumper Rick Harrison to a reporter from High Country News in July 2015. “It can really play tricks on you.” He also said that those who jump in national parks often use old gear instead of their best equipment, because they fear that their gear will be confiscated if they are caught.

  This is not what happened to Amber Bellows, but it may have played a role nearly five weeks later in the death of Sean Leary, a man with a solid reputation as “one of the most talented Yosemite climbers of his generation,” a tribute in Climbing magazine tells us. Leary had scaled the 2,900-foot El Capitan in Yosemite National Park at least fifty times, including a record-setting scramble he completed in an astonishing two and a half hours—a route that takes mere mortals two to three days to complete. His BASE jumping included use of a wingsuit in remote spots all over the world, most notably in Patagonia, where he leaped from a 7,917-foot peak called El Mocho to scatter the ashes of Roberta Nunes, a friend who had died in an auto accident. Leary opened up “exits,” a term for jumping-off points, in places as far away as Antarctica and above the Arctic Circle.

  He arrived at Zion on March 13, 2014, with plans to jump in the West Temple area of the park that day and then meet up with a group of rock climbers the day after. When he did not arrive back home in California as scheduled on March 23, his family got in touch with the park. Park officials determined that Leary had not joined the climbers as scheduled on March 14.

  As soon as word went out that Leary had gone missing in the park, fellow climbers, jumpers, and friends began to arrive at Zion to assist in the search.

  “Hours later, Leary’s body, rigged up in his BASE jumping gear, was found 300 feet beneath a high ridge in the park’s West Temple area,” the Los Angeles Times reported, adding, “He was 38 and about to become a father.” The body was found in an aerial search using Grand Canyon’s helicopter, in an area known as the Three Marys.

  “Several of his experienced climbing friends were on standby to help move Leary to the top of the peak in case the helicopter had
trouble reaching him,” the park’s news release said. “They also helped SAR rangers manage lines set up to reach Leary.”

  Recovery had to be postponed for several days because of harsh winds, but the team finally executed its plan to short-haul two rangers to a ledge above the body. They climbed down to Leary, rigged his remains for a long-line haul under the helicopter, and removed him from the remote area.

  A lifelong climber who grew up in El Portal, California, virtually in the shadow of the High Sierra Mountains, Leary began BASE jumping in 2006 after Nunes’s death, in part to ease the pain of loss. “I needed something that would take me to a different spot,” he said in an interview. Later, he told filmmaker Chad Copeland, as quoted by the Times, “You’re floating, you’re floating—it’s just magic when the wingsuit pops open and inflates and you start to take off.”

  The park service acknowledges this thrill, but it also remains firm in its prohibition of BASE jumping. “There are places within the United States that one can BASE jump, but not in Zion,” acting park superintendent Jim Milestone said in the park’s news release about the recovery mission. “There are many reasons for this, from resource protection, to visitor and employee safety, to Wilderness mandates. BASE jumping is not congruent with the founding purpose of this park.”

  Before we close this chapter, there’s more to the story of Amber Bellows and Clayton Butler. On January 15, 2015, less than a year after Bellows fell to her death in Zion, Butler died while paragliding in Oahu, Hawaii. He fell from Kaena Point, on the westernmost tip of the island. Butler was thirty years old.

  Chapter 6

  Sudden Darkness: The Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel

  The Arizona Republic waxed eloquent on July 6, 1930, two days after the formal dedication of an engineering marvel in the heart of Zion National Park: “No highway completed in the west in a number of years has opened up the scenic beauty to motorists that a trip through the Mt. Carmel tunnel and the connecting roads affords . . . The new road, beginning near the park ranger station at the entrance, is only 26 miles long, but it is declared to be the most scenic in all America.” In particular, the writer admired the road’s new tunnels: “It incorporates two tunnels, one 5,600 feet long and the other more than 400 feet in length. These tunnels are cut through the crimson rock that forms the mountains, and some six galleries have been opened for ventilation and to afford motorists opportunities to view the wonderful panoramas that unfold before them as their cars emerge from the darkness.”

  Three years in the making at a cost of nearly $3 million (a value of more than $41 million in 2017 dollars), the new scenic highway and the Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel created a direct route from Zion to Bryce Canyon National Park to the northeast, and to Grand Canyon National Park to the south in Arizona, cutting the travel time to Bryce Canyon in half and shortening the time to Grand Canyon by a third. The National Park Service, the State of Utah, and the Bureau of Public Roads all had a hand in the project, but the vision for it came from National Park Service director Stephen Mather, who envisioned a “Grand Loop” highway that would become a “center of American tourism.” The road through Zion was a small section of Mather’s larger concept, but it formed a critical link that made a motor tour of Utah’s parks accessible and affordable for millions of tourists. It also opened an area of the park that only intrepid tourists on foot or horseback had any chance of seeing before: Pine Creek Canyon and the eastern plateau, a world of vertical Navajo sandstone formations and planes of variegated slickrock.

  The tunnel itself presented one of the road’s greatest challenges. At the time of its construction, the 1.1-mile tunnel was the longest underground passageway in the national park system, and the engineering involved in its planning and construction pioneered new techniques that made this tunnel a manmade marvel in an extraordinary natural wilderness. The Nevada Contracting Company took on the challenge of actually building the tunnel under the supervision of expert crew bosses from across the country. They began by blasting gallery openings into the soft sandstone, creating a literal window in the side of the rock face through which they could reach the wall’s interior. Carefully carving out the tunnel and removing rock, dirt, and sand through these windows, the crews burrowed out a narrow shaft from one end of the tunnel to the other, and then began the long, meticulous process of widening and shaping the tunnel from the inside.

  It was during this construction that accidents began to happen—including two incidents that took the lives of diligent workmen.

  The only way to remove large areas of rock during the construction was with the use of dynamite, blasting huge boulders into smaller rocks that could be hauled away or allowed to drop below the roadway and into the canyon. Blasting, however, came with its own side effects: The reverberations and destruction of sandstone layers caused rockslides, with rocks and dirt rolling uncontrolled through the work area.

  Just such a rockfall caught Allan T. McClain, a thirty-five-year-old worker from Cleveland, Ohio, on January 19, 1928. McClain was operating a steam shovel when a rock fell from a ledge above him, crushing him against the machine. “The accident occurred at 3 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, and he was immediately taken to a doctor,” the Iron County Record reported, “but his lungs were so badly crushed, and possibly other internal injuries, that he died at three o’clock the next morning.”

  Only one other person had the misfortune to perish during the massive construction project. Johnny Morrison, a crew boss, died in the pilot tunnel—the small shaft the crews drilled to set the course of the tunnel before “ring drilling” the entire breadth, height, and width of the final opening. Knowing that workers would need adequate ventilation to labor in this narrow space, the project bosses planned five windows, or galleries, along the length of the tunnel as work progressed. On the night of July 1, 1928, crews blasted through the rock to open a connection between the third and fourth galleries, creating a particularly dramatic amount of sand and toxic dynamite fumes. Morrison was overcome and did not survive.

  Given the size, scope, and topography of the project, we can consider it remarkable that these were the only two deaths among the workers.

  Once the tunnel opened, twenty-eight years passed before Zion saw its first fatality from traffic—and this first death falls under the heading of “freak accident.” Mrs. Milo D. Long of San Jose, California, stood posing for a photo in one of the tunnel’s scenic gallery windows when she inexplicably lost her balance. She tumbled over the three-foot-high rock wall at the base of the window and plunged downward through the window and into the canyon below while her husband, who was holding the camera, watched in disbelief. “County Sheriff Roy A. Renouf said no inquest would be held in the mishap,” the Deseret News reported two days later.

  The South Wall

  With the advent of the interstate highway system in the 1950s and America’s newfound love of the road trip in the 1960s and 1970s, traffic through Zion and many other national parks increased significantly. Zion officials began to realize that the curved nature of the Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel along its 1.1-mile length had not been planned to accommodate the volume of large, fast cars and trucks moving through it on a daily basis.

  The tunnel’s darkness and curves took their first victim in 1972, when twenty-one-year-old motorcycle rider Steven Michael Rose of Santa Rosa, California, lost control of his cycle as he entered the tunnel. “Officers say he drove the cycle into the tunnel wall,” United Press International reported on June 7. “The tunnel leads through a mountainside to the lower level of the park and is not lighted.”

  In 1974 a second motorcycle death occurred, this time when three riders crashed into the tunnel’s south wall at a point where it curves to the right. Harvey Frank Hoff, twenty-nine, of Phoenix died in the crash, and two other Phoenix visitors were injured: Brad Martin, twenty-one, and Roy W. Bieghler, thirty-two. The accident took place over Memorial Day weekend, a particularly crowded time in
all of the western national parks. In all, eight riders were on a motorcycle trip together through the Utah parks when the crash occurred, according to a lawsuit filed in 1980 by the injured Bieghler and Hoff’s widow, Joanne. Ms. Hoff and Bieghler sought damages for what they deemed to be negligence on the park’s part, alleging “negligence in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of the tunnel.” The court ruled in favor of the United States, preventing the case from going to trial, but the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Phoenix overturned the lower court’s decision. The appellate court based this on the testimony of an accident reconstruction expert, whose examination of the tunnel led him to conclude that the crash was due to negligence on the part of the Department of the Interior, because the inside of the tunnel did not have adequate lighting. This landmark decision, one quoted in dozens of cases that followed, allowed the plaintiffs to go to trial.

  The case came to trial in 1982. Bieghler and Hoff’s attorney, John H. Westover, claimed that the tunnel was a “deathtrap,” according to United Press International’s coverage of the trial, published in the Arizona Republic. “This tunnel is extremely dark and dangerous,” he said in court. “It is a trap that catches victims, and it is one that caught Mr. Bieghler and Mr. Hoff.” The $4.5 million lawsuit was filed in the US district court in Phoenix. Westover added that the tunnel was lighted by holes that let in sunlight, and that a flash of sunlight coming through the hole at the curve “temporarily blinded the motorcyclists.”