Death in Zion National Park Read online

  The Associated Press reported that Christensen “employed two 200-foot ropes, one 11 millimeters thick, the other 8 millimeters. Both were used for the rappel in which their ends were tied together and fed through anchors secured to the rock,” giving Christensen a total of four hundred feet of rope length for the rappel. This arrangement requires extra care during the rappel, however, because “the smaller rope will feed through the rappel device faster than the fatter one, because its smaller surface area produces less friction.” Some thirty feet of rope was still attached to the rappel device when Christensen was found.

  Buccello suggested a second possibility: Christensen may have been struck by a falling rock, which in turn made him let go and fall. Either way, the investigator speculated that Christensen had fallen more than six hundred feet.

  “John loved the outdoors,” Christensen’s obituary in the Deseret News read, “and he loved being with his family.” Before his death he had been serving as the young men’s president in the Edgemont Sixteenth Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He and his wife were raising five children.

  No Unnecessary Risk

  Some deaths on Angels Landing occur out of sheer bad luck—not because people underestimated their fear of heights or attempted to scale a precipitous wall. Georg Sender, age sixty-three, came to Zion from Illertissen, Germany, with Rotel Tours of Germany—one of thousands of tourists from countries around the world who visit Utah’s national parks every season. It’s no surprise that he would choose to hike up the trail to Angels Landing to see one of the most magnificent views in the American West, nor is it particularly unusual for someone to stray off the trail a few feet to get a closer look at an interesting butterfly or to catch an early glimpse of the panorama.

  In Sender’s case, however, the momentary lapse proved disastrous. He tumbled down a slope and fell roughly fifteen feet. Exactly what injuries he suffered were not detailed in the park’s morning report the following day, but the account of the incident, written by Zion staff member Tom Haraden, gave a gripping description of the August 2, 2000, accident scene: “Several EMT’s and a Swiss emergency room physician were nearby and provided immediate medical assistance, including CPR. The latter was terminated after 45 minutes after consultation with the physician on scene and medical control at Dixie Regional Medical Center. A hiker in the vicinity used his cell phone to call for help, and park personnel were dispatched to the scene; an NPS trail crew working nearby was first to arrive. The body was removed by helicopter. Counselors were on scene to provide assistance to witnesses and family and conduct a CISD briefing for responders.” Most accident victims do not have the benefit of the immediate medical attention Sender received; it was his misfortune that his injuries were too severe to respond to this intervention.

  The death of Mark Ertischek, a sixty-year-old attorney for the municipality of Anchorage, Alaska, might not have received national media coverage in an average week, but the week including his death on June 9, 2007, was far from average. Zion experienced its first-ever series of three deaths in the space of a few days, of which Ertischek—who collapsed with a heart attack while walking the trail on the approach to Angels Landing—was the third. (Another of the three, Barry Goldstein, is detailed later in this chapter; Keith Biedermann’s fall in Heaps Canyon is in chapter 5.)

  “Park officials say a vacationing firefighter was the first on the scene and began to administer CPR,” the Associated Press story tells us.

  Tiffany DeMasters of the Spectrum, the newspaper of St. George, Utah, spoke with public information officer Tom Haraden to find out more. Haraden said that while Ertischek was hiking alone, several people on the trail saw him fall to the ground. “When he collapsed, there was no heartbeat and no pulse,” Haraden said. “We did CPR for about 50 minutes until DRMC told us to cease.”

  Ertischek had provided his legal expertise to the State of Alaska Attorney General’s Office and the state’s Human Rights Commission, making his death a fairly high-profile one in Alaska and beyond.

  Fall from Scout Lookout

  Dorothy Kaiser, a sixty-six-year-old visitor from Joshua Tree, California, left her hotel room at Zion Lodge on Sunday, January 19, 2003, and drove to the nearby Grotto parking area. She left her vehicle and started up the trail to Angels Landing—a trail that likely had some icy patches along its 2.4-mile length, but that may not have daunted someone hardy enough to visit Zion in winter on her own. After a fairly energetic hike with an elevation gain of about 1,100 feet, she reached Scout Lookout—a good place to stop and admire the view well above the floor of Zion Canyon.

  What exactly happened next has never been determined, but Kaiser did not return to her room at Zion Lodge.

  On Monday, January 20, when Kaiser did not check out on time, Zion Lodge staff went to her room late in the day and discovered that her belongings were still inside. The lodge contacted park headquarters, and dispatchers alerted the night patrol rangers to begin looking for her vehicle. The rangers discovered it parked at the Grotto. When it was still there the following morning, a search team set out on the West Rim Trail to trace Kaiser’s most likely route after she left her car on Sunday. They reached Scout Lookout, peered over the edge, and spotted “some type of personal gear at the base of Scout Lookout,” according to the park’s morning report.

  The team radioed this news to dispatch, and a second search team made its way to the base of the peak. There they found the body of Kaiser, who had fallen nine hundred feet from Scout Lookout.

  The matter went to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office for further investigation, but that office tells me that there is no record of any findings.

  Only Kaiser knew exactly what happened on that chilly January afternoon. Perhaps she stepped on a patch of ice and slid over the edge. Perhaps—and this seems more likely—she intended to end her life . . . and if so, perhaps her motives are none of our business.

  The Bet

  The newspaper accounts were surprisingly terse about the death of young Kristoffer Jones, a fourteen-year-old boy from Long Beach, California, on June 25, 2004. The Associated Press reported that Jones and his Boy Scout troop were “at Angels Landing, a popular but steep hiking spot in the southern Utah park, when he fell off a cliff Friday afternoon . . . A search and rescue crew had to rappel down the cliff to get to the body, which was recovered Saturday morning.”

  Park spokesperson Ron Terry said that the incident was under investigation, “but we don’t know the cause at this time.”

  They soon found a more harrowing chain of events than anyone would wish to discover.

  The Washington County Sheriff’s Office and the National Park Service revealed that Jones went out onto a slim ledge eight hundred feet above Zion Canyon and well off the Angels Landing trail to scratch his name into the side of the cliff.

  He did this to impress a group of boys he had just met on his visit to Provo, while he stayed with his grandmother and his uncle, Rene Doria, as he often did during the summer. Doria had approved his nephew’s participation in a trip to Zion organized by the Bonneville Third Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with about forty Scouts, with the assumption that the group would have adequate adult supervision by ward and Scout leaders to keep them all safe.

  Once in the park, the group split into four groups of ten. Somehow, a group of four or five boys including Kristoffer broke away from the larger group as they approached the peak of Angels Landing, and they became separated from their leader. The other boys dared Kristoffer to go out on a ledge some 1,200 feet above the canyon floor and write his name on the cliff face. They sweetened the deal with a wager of five dollars against his ability to do it.

  Kristoffer took the bet. “Boy Scouts are taught to eschew risky behavior, but none of the Scouts who knew of the bet tried to stop Kristoffer from collecting,” a story in the Salt Lake Tribune noted. “According to investig
ative reports, one Scout who watched Jones crawl onto the ledge simply told the boy, ‘Don’t die.’”

  The other participating boys are not named in the report, but Chief Deputy Rob Tersigni told Tribune reporter Matthew D. LaPlante that photographs taken by a witness show “several boys standing on a ledge behind Kristoffer on Angels Landing.” The witness told police he saw the boys running around and jumping between rocks—all without an adult Scout leader present. Later, the same witness “saw three of the Scouts walking back down the trail and overheard one of them say, ‘He’s probably hurt or dead.’”

  The boys had left the trail and were hundreds of feet beyond where it was considered safe to go. “According to the report, Kristoffer was about six feet from the nearest Scout and was scooting along a steep slope when he lost his footing,” the Tribune said.

  Only one of the boys said that he actually saw Kristoffer fall. Several, however, heard him scream. Even then, the boys did not run for help immediately—instead, they linked arms and formed a chain to see if they could see where Kristoffer had landed. By the time an adult arrived at the top of Angels Landing, the damage was long since done.

  Several weeks later, when the sheriff’s report of the investigation landed on the desks of the Boy Scouts’ Orem-based National Parks Council, executives knew they had a problem that required action. Unit-level Boy Scout executive Gaylun Smith told the Tribune that he would “find out who did what . . . It’s really sad for the boys who did this, because even if no action is ever taken, they will have to live with this—and they have a lot of life left to live.” He noted that one of the leaders who had been on the Zion trip with the Scouts had “changed callings” of his own volition because of what happened to Kristoffer.

  The sheriff’s report also made Kristoffer’s family begin to consider legal action against the Scout troop. Two years later, on June 14, 2006, Ruth Jones, Kristoffer’s mother, filed a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America, the Utah National Parks Council, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claiming negligence on their part in her son’s death.

  Lynn Harris, the Provo attorney representing Jones, had served as a Scoutmaster himself. “My first allegation in the suit was, who was the idiot who decided to take 40 Scouts to the top of Angels Landing?” he told the Los Angeles Times. “They are kids. They do stupid things.”

  While the Times reported that a settlement was reached in the case, the court ordered that the terms be sealed.

  Falling from the Neck

  Perhaps the increasing popularity of Zion National Park drew more hikers to Angels Landing in the latter half of the twenty-first century’s first decade, or perhaps the availability of information about the strenuous hike heightened its appeal. With more hikers came more opportunities for people to misjudge the very real danger involved in crossing the slim ridge to reach the viewpoint just beyond it.

  Bernadette Vander Meer was an experienced hiker, as a cousin who posted to the National Parks Traveler blog on August 30, 2006, made clear. “My cousin Bernadette had been hiking from a very young age,” she wrote. “She new [sic] about the dangers.”

  Vander Meer worked at the New York New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, led worship and sang at the New Song Christian Church there, and lived “a life painted in love,” as her family expressed on August 23 in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “She loved family, friends, nature, music, and performing on stage,” the notice continued.

  At dawn on Tuesday, August 22, 2006, twenty-nine-year-old Bernadette and her husband, David, rode bicycles into Zion to the Grotto parking area and began their hike on the West Rim Trail to Angels Landing. They passed Scout Lookout, and began their crossing of the neck when something went wrong. Whether Bernadette had a spell of vertigo, lost her grasp of the chain meant to provide a sturdy handhold, or bobbled her footing, or a rock gave way underfoot, we will never know for certain. What we do know is that she fell to the canyon below.

  David called 911 from his cellular phone, and the emergency dispatch notified the park at 6:30 a.m. Search and rescue teams responded quickly. Bringing a helicopter in from Page, Arizona, they spotted Bernadette on a talus slope about 1,200 feet below Angels Landing and notified the ground rescue team of her location. It was 4:00 p.m. before they brought her body out of the canyon.

  Washington County sheriff’s chief deputy Rob Tersigni told the Deseret News that the sheriff’s office was treating the death as an accident. “The investigation is not complete yet,” he said on the day of Vander Meer’s death. “We’re leaning towards an accidental fall, but we’re still following up on it.” Evidence pointed investigators to the eventual conclusion that this was indeed nothing more than a tragic accident.

  A year later, another fall claimed the life of a fifty-three-year-old man hiking with a large group of family and friends. This time, witnesses actually saw the victim on his way across the neck, standing close to the edge—and then disappearing over it.

  Dr. Barry S. Goldstein and his family were visiting from Creve Coeur, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, to celebrate a wedding that was to take place the following day.

  “We were sitting there and couldn’t believe what we were watching,” said Mike Farley, who was eating lunch with a group of teenage boys and other adults at a nearby peak on June 8, 2007, when a man within their range of sight suddenly vanished over the edge. “It was a sheer dropoff. There were no second chances when he went off.”

  Farley immediately dialed 911. “They had left ten minutes before us and were crossing the narrow neck,” he told the Deseret News later that day. “The guy had been standing near the edge . . . the man who was next to him before he fell later told me that he [Goldstein] was goofing off near the edge and the ground crumbled as he stepped back. We could see him fall—just like that he was gone.”

  Zion Dispatch also received a call from Goldstein’s family members at 11:55 a.m., and rangers immediately responded. They searched at the base of the cliff and found the body quickly, confirming that the fall had been fatal. “It is estimated that Goldstein fell approximately 1,000 feet to his death,” the park’s news release said.

  While friends and coworkers in St. Louis were shocked to hear of Goldstein’s death, “no one was surprised to hear it happened while he was hiking along the edge of a towering cliff in a national park,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted on June 11, 2007.

  Friends knew that the well-liked anesthesiologist loved to be outside, and that he exercised daily and kept in shape. Goldstein visited Vail, Colorado, twice a year to hike the mountain trails, according to Dr. Christopher Felling, one of his partners in private practice at Ballas Anesthesia. “Hiking was his thing,” Felling told the Post-Dispatch.

  Goldstein and his family had just moved to a larger house in Town and Country, Missouri, one they had spent time gutting and rehabilitating. He had joined the private practice just five years earlier after working as the head anesthesiologist at the Des Peres Square Surgery Center. “Co-workers described Dr. Goldstein as an excellent doctor,” the paper said. “He was funny, easygoing, and enjoyed wine.”

  Like Bernadette Vander Meer, Goldstein had plenty of hiking experience, and he knew what to expect at the top of Angels Landing. The fact that knowledgeable, athletic hikers have plunged to their death from this peak says a great deal about the need for caution and self-awareness when daring yourself to cross the neck.

  Nancy Maltez of Glendora, California, also was no stranger to a challenging trail. “She was an experienced hiker,” her sister posted to the National Parks Traveler website on August 10, 2009. Maltez had reached the summit of Angels Landing with her husband and three children—ages fourteen to twenty—on Sunday morning, August 9, 2009, just as she and her family had done a number of times before. This time, however, she took a wrong step while crossing a portion of the trail known as the “saddle area” on the way to the summit, and lost her footing.

/>   “I am told [this trail] was one of their favorites,” her sister continued. “By all accounts she simply stumbled and fell. She was a very grounded person so I am sure there would have been no horseplay up there.”

  Search and rescue crews located Maltez’s body before noon, and the park and sheriff’s office closed the trail for a few hours as they completed their investigation. Meanwhile, discussion on hiking, canyoneering, and park enthusiast websites began to buzz about Angels Landing and the mounting number of fatalities there in recent years. Some called for the trail to be closed permanently. Others recommended that warning signs be posted, including a sign that would list all the recent deaths. Many commented that untold thousands of people hiked the trail each year without incident, and that the trail was “safer than a car ride.”

  Julie Sheer of the Los Angeles Times noted, “As for Angels Landing restrictions, of course the trail should not be closed, or have a snack shop at the top . . . I do think some additional signage wouldn’t hurt. It might send a signal to casual hikers and make them stop and think before proceeding.”

  Not quite four months later, on November 27, another hiker fell from the peak.

  Tammy Grunig and her husband, Michael, had purchased a home in St. George with the goal of moving there from their residence in Pocatello, Idaho, one day to retire. They split their time between the two homes as Tammy worked in audiology and speech pathology at Portneuf Medical Center in Pocatello, and Michael held a job with ON Semiconductor there. Tammy also served as an affiliated clinical staff member at Idaho State University, and she worked with a home health organization as well.

  They had just returned from spending Thanksgiving in Las Vegas with Michael’s mother and younger brother, when Tammy decided to go hiking in Zion. Rick Grunig, Michael’s brother, told the Idaho State Journal that Tammy, who was fifty years old, had recently focused on getting into shape and losing some weight. “She talked about [hiking] to my mom during Thanksgiving,” Rick said. “She’s not a real big hiker, but she had been on Angels Landing before. She was basically trying to get herself fit again. She had dropped about 60 pounds, if not more. She was looking really good.”