Death in Zion National Park Page 8

  In another example of sheer bad luck, thirty-five-year-old Larry Price of Crested Butte, Colorado, and his longtime friend Lawrence Rowlands climbed to the top of Court of the Patriarchs on November 22, 1994, but ran out of daylight before they could make it back to the trailhead. Price took a wrong step at about 8:00 p.m., missed the trail, and fell an estimated one hundred feet to his death. The search and recovery team brought his body out of the canyon the following day. “Preliminary findings indicate that not completing the climb in daylight may have contributed to his accident,” the park’s press release said.

  Many years later, a second’s lapse in attention resulted in the death of a park employee. On July 20, 2013, twenty-two-year-old Scott Schena, originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, spent a precious Saturday afternoon off from his job with Xanterra, the park’s hospitality concessionaire, socializing with several other employees at Employee Falls, a watercourse behind the Zion Lodge employee housing area. When four other employees arrived to practice rappelling skills, he joined them and climbed above the falls. He walked near the edge at the top of the falls to wave to the group below, and in an instant he lost his footing and fell fifty feet onto the rocks below.

  “Ranger/medics provided ALS medical care while evacuating Schena from the canyon,” the next day’s Zion morning report read. “During the evacuation, he became unresponsive and stopped breathing. Schena was resuscitated by the rangers and Lifeflight personnel and transported by air to Dixie Regional Medical Center, where he passed away.”

  Schena had worked the previous season in the Mt. McKinley Lodge at Denali National Park, and had planned a life of cooking and adventure travel work.

  Alone in Zion

  Few yearnings take on the awesome power of a solo hike in the wilderness, an exploration of the backcountry with nothing but your hiking skill, a few choice pieces of equipment, a pack full of food and supplies, and your wits. The opportunity to move at your own pace, linger where you wish, and wrap yourself in solitude can be so attractive that it pushes all thoughts of the potential dangers out of your consciousness. To wander like Thoreau or Whitman, to hear yourself think and to truly experience unbroken silence . . . what could be more appealing? Ah, wilderness!

  Most people who attempt extended solo hikes probably come home unscathed, but we do not hear about those fortunate souls in the media. Instead, we hear the stories of the few who do not survive: Yi Jien Wa, who walked out into the Glacier National Park backcountry and vanished until bits of his remains were found four years later; Geraldine Largay, who left the Appalachian Trail to relieve herself and disappeared for two years, finally found dead of exposure in her tent in the Maine woods; Marie Caseiro, hiking near the Alta Ski Resort in Utah, who fell from a hundred-foot cliff off of a ski run in Little Cottonwood Canyon . . . and Affin William Phillips, a student at the University of Utah, who walked off into the Kolob section of Zion National Park with no climbing gear and no identification and did not come back alive.

  “On the evening of May 14 [1993], two hikers advised the park that they had seen what they suspected were human remains in the rugged eastern end of the South Fork of Taylor Creek,” the national park’s morning report for May 1993 tells us. Mid-May remains a snowy, icy time in Zion’s high country, so the first search party to attempt to locate these remains had to turn back to wait for daylight and to acquire more extensive gear. The following day, the Zion search and rescue team included climbing rangers and other local expert climbers, and their long search for the unidentified body finally ended after seven hours of “travel over extremely hazardous terrain, including ice bridges, precipitous snow-covered cliffs, and unstable ground.”

  The search and rescue team had hoped to use a helicopter to remove the body from the treacherous terrain, but the narrow canyon and the height of the surrounding cliffs made this impossible. Instead, the team worked together to move the body to a less remote and lower location. There they met the Washington County sheriff’s rescue team, who assisted in hand-carrying the body back to the trailhead. “A total of ten people from three agencies were involved,” the report said.

  With no driver’s license or other documents on the victim, the sheriff’s office had to find some way to identify the body. After a fall of as much as one thousand feet, the body had sustained massive trauma, so immediate identification proved to be impossible—but the state medical examiner in Salt Lake City had more resources and was able to help. Luckily, one clue did turn up quickly: a lone car parked at the trailhead, a find that gave the sheriff a family to contact to see if the car’s owner was missing. The family helped the medical examiner obtain dental records, leading him to identify the victim as twenty-one-year-old Phillips.

  “The coroner ruled that Williams [sic] had died within 36 hours of the discovery of his body,” the park report concluded. Sergeant Rymal Hinton of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office told reporters at the Associated Press that it looked like Phillips had fallen because of the ice on the slopes. “He had neither climbing gear nor ropes and wore only sweat pants and moccasins,” the wire service noted.

  Not all hikers intend to be on their own in the backcountry, but the decision to leave a larger group to double back to the trailhead can lead to unforeseen dangers. On May 16, 2001, Penny Lewis, a thirty-seven-year-old woman most recently from Beaumont, Texas, left her two companions in the Left Fork of North Creek (the trail also known as the Subway) to make her way back to the trailhead alone. Lewis had coached basketball at the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Pacifica, and Quincy University in her hometown in Illinois; had served as assistant coach for the 1994 US Olympic Festival team; and had most recently become an assistant coach at the Division 1 level at Lamar University—so she had the athleticism and stamina to handle some rough trail hiking. Whether she had the specific skills needed to stay safe on a trail as demanding as the Subway is hard to say in retrospect. This permit-required hike involves wading through streams that are icy cold in mid-May, and climbing up steep slopes on uneven ground.

  No one knows exactly what happened next, but some time later, two hikers found her “motionless and unresponsive on the trail,” according to the park’s morning report on the incident. Lewis was about a mile from the trailhead.

  One of these hikers ran to the trailhead, flagged down a visitor in a car, explained the situation, and asked for a cell phone to call for help. The dispatch operator quickly reached a group of backcountry rangers on a training exercise fairly close to the trailhead, so they responded at once and reached Lewis quickly, where the other hiker had stayed with her. “They found that Lewis had no vital signs and that she’d been in that condition for at least 40 minutes,” the report reads. As protocol dictates, the rangers contacted Dixie Regional Medical Center and were advised not to attempt resuscitation, given that so much time had elapsed with no vital signs.

  Investigators determined that Lewis had strayed from the trail and found herself at a high spot along the river, and that she attempted to work her way back to the trail down a long slope. “She apparently fell about 50 feet,” the report concluded. Washington County sheriff Kirk Smith told the Deseret News, “There was some indication that she had fallen, but there was no apparent massive injury.”

  Slickrock in Hidden Canyon

  Some Zion hikes offer two kinds of experiences: a carefully planned trail for casual hikers with the reward of a magnificent view, and a more adventurous route beyond for people who enjoy a technical climb or a scramble. Hidden Canyon is just such a hike. It begins at the Weeping Rock trailhead, where many visitors head on their first day in the park to begin to adjust to the park’s elevation with a short hike, and serpentines along the east side of the main canyon on a paved path. The trail then follows a series of switchbacks (no longer paved) to snake along the canyon wall, with some chains to provide a handhold. Finally, after a short descent, it climbs once again, this time up a series of step
s chiseled out of stone. The trail ends with a walk along a narrow ledge to the beginning of the canyon, where you can enjoy the view of dark sandstone walls before either turning back—as most people do—or continuing into the canyon itself.

  Those who choose to go on are in for a series of scrambles over boulders and slickrock, wanderings through more open areas, and the potential for some climbing. That’s where twenty-seven-year-old Shawn Tuell ran into trouble while scrambling over slickrock with his uncle on August 1, 1998. Tuell simply slipped and fell, tumbling thirty feet and hitting his head on the way down. Remarkably, he survived the initial fall—but it took his uncle an hour and a half to hike out of the canyon and notify rangers that his nephew needed help.

  Even with the gap in response time, however, Tuell still hung on until rescue crews reached him. They began life support, but Tuell went into cardiac arrest—and after an hour of CPR while waiting for a rescue helicopter to arrive from Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Tuell finally breathed his last. “More than twenty-five people were involved in the rescue, which ended at midnight,” the Deseret News reported three days later.

  Witness to a Fall

  Many national parks in the southern half of the country become centers of bustling activity on the day after Thanksgiving. Vacationers, local families, and others who have the rare Friday off come to the parks to begin to work off the previous day’s feasting, making the most of the last days before the snows of winter render park roads and trails impassable.

  On just such a day in 2008, Craig Forster, director of the University of Utah’s Office of Sustainability, joined friends at Zion to launch the holiday season with a wilderness hike. They chose a trail through an unnamed canyon near Utah Route 9, and they had just scrambled up to a flat ledge at about 3:00 p.m. when the trail led them down a short slope. In the space of an instant, Forster lost his footing and slid down the slope to its end at a cliff edge. He managed to grip the edge and hang on for a moment, but not long enough for his friends to attempt a rescue—momentum forced him to let go and fall about twenty feet. His friends reached him in seconds and began CPR.

  Others in the canyon saw him plunge off the edge, and one witness ran for help, notifying the rangers at the park’s east entrance that “a man had fallen about twenty feet, landed mainly on his head and was unconscious when he [the witness] had left to get help,” the park’s news release stated. Rangers were on the scene within twelve minutes with an automated external defibrillator and a LIFEPAK defibrillator/monitor, and they used all of their capabilities to revive Forster. In the end, they were not successful.

  A professor of hydrogeology in the university’s architecture and planning department, Forster took on leadership of the Office of Sustainability because it was a student initiative—and he was never happier than when he was working with students, his wife, Bonnie Baty, told the Deseret News a few days after his death. “He liked the idea he was passing on the torch,” she said. “Motivating people was one of his great loves.”

  Patrick Reimherr, president of the Associated Students of the University of Utah, echoed this observation. “It is rare when a professor will take a student project and help it come to life,” he told the paper. “He incorporated students into the office well, he let students generate their own projects and worked with them to create success.” Under Forster’s leadership the office helped introduce sustainability solutions on campus, including a recycling program, installation of an efficient watering system, a campus farmer’s market, and a cogeneration plant.

  In Forster’s honor, Utah State University—where he had been a faculty member in the geology department—established the Summit Fund, both to provide scholarships to geology students and to fund the annual Craig Forster Lecture Series, which presents topics of interest to geology students and scientists.

  Family Tragedy at Middle Emerald Pool

  Minutes before Tyler Jeffrey Eggertz slipped on a rock, his father, Jeffrey Eggertz, cautioned him and his sister, Brittany, to stay away from the ledge.

  Tyler, who was twelve, hiked the Emerald Pools trail with his fifteen-year-old sister and a fourteen-year-old cousin. The three broke away from their father and the rest of the family at a fork in the trail and headed up the right branch from the Lower to the Middle Emerald Pool while the family took the left branch. Tyler and Brittany passed signs that informed them, “All three Emerald Pools and connecting creeks are closed to swimming, bathing and wading,” and others that cautioned, “Stay on trail. Caution. Near the edge footing can be dangerous.” Any parent can tell you, however, that teenagers pay little if any heed to such warnings.

  When they reached the Middle Emerald Pool, the three children left the trail. They spotted a sandstone plateau they could use as a seat a short distance off the trail, about fifteen feet from the ledge, and sat there to dangle their feet into a side stream that terminated in a brisk cascade. The stream dropped over the nearby ledge.

  One account says that Tyler simply tried to stand up, but a court document reports that he actually attempted to cross the stream. Whichever is more accurate, the result was the same: Tyler stepped on an algae-covered rock and his foot went out from under him. He fell into the stream, where the water was only about five inches deep, but it flowed strongly enough to drag him forward, out of his sister’s reach, and pull him over the ledge. He plummeted one hundred feet, missed the plunge pool at the bottom of the falls, and instead hit the boulder garden next to it.

  This all took place in the space of two or three heartbeats at 3:45 p.m. on March 28, 1997, in front of crowds of fellow hikers. Some attempted to provide first aid and revive the boy, but Tyler was pronounced dead at the scene.

  Later, park spokesman Denny Davies told the Deseret News that had Brittany and the cousin tried to grab Tyler when he slipped, “They too would have fallen.”

  The story has a further bleak twist—Jeffrey Eggertz, his wife, Lora, and their three- and seven-year-old children had gone on another half mile to Upper Emerald Pool. They had lost sight of Tyler and Brittany, and expected to meet up with them again on the way down. Instead, they met a park ranger, who told them there had been a fatality at the middle pool.

  “I asked if the family was with the person,” Jeffrey said. He described his son to the ranger. In an instant of terrible clarity, he knew the boy in the accident was Tyler.

  “You kind of go numb for a while, then it hits you,” he told the Deseret News.

  Tyler’s mother, Nancy Elder, with whom Tyler lived in Sandy, described her son as an energetic boy whose passions included motorcycling, Scouting, rollerblading, and snowboarding. “He probably lived more in his twelve years than us if we lived to be one hundred,” she told the Deseret News.

  Tyler’s death became a catalyst for some changes along the Emerald Pools trail. At the beginning of the trail, the park has added a sign that states, “Please: Watch your children—there are steep drop-offs. Swimming or wading in the pools is prohibited.” A rope chain was installed near the Middle Emerald Pool to better define the path of the trail, and to discourage people from wandering off of it. The park moved some of the existing signs to make them more prominent. None of the signs specifically mentioned that rocks might become slippery with algae, however—and in February 2000, Jeffrey Eggertz and Nancy Elder filed a lawsuit against the United States of America, seeking $3.5 million in damages for the wrongful death of their son. Attorney Kathryn Collard, who represented the family in this case, told an Associated Press reporter, “I’ve always been of the mind that once you’re in the woods, you are on your own. But this case has changed my mind.”

  The district court that heard the case ruled against the plaintiffs, and the parents brought the case to the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The judges affirmed the district court’s decision in the case. “Plaintiffs challenge the adequacy of the signage existing at the time of the accident, including the two signs tha
t said, ‘Danger-Cliff. Slippery Sandstone. Unstable Rock Edge. Wet Rock Hazardous,’” Judge Ruggero J. Aldisert wrote in his decision.

  But what would constitute an adequate warning: Bigger signs? Signs embedded in the sandstone immediately next to each stream? Such “solutions,” however, have an impact on park aesthetics. And even if Plaintiffs are contending only that the wording of existing signs should have been altered to mention algae specifically, such a change would necessitate a chain of further decisions. Would not Zion managers then have to decide whether it is necessary to add signs that explain how to identify algae . . . or that warn of the hazards of wet rock not covered by algae, and whether such additional signage would impair the scenery too much, as well as numb visitors to all warnings?

  The judge’s assessment of the problem states exactly the kind of decisions every national park faces on a daily basis. In the end, this case and all the others in this book serve as fair warnings to park visitors: Every trail, every climb, and every river and stream can be hazardous. National parks push us to take personal responsibility for every step we take—and when we let our guard slip, an accident can lead to a tragedy.

  Chapter 5

  Daring Fate: Climbing, Canyoneering, and BASE Jumping Accidents

  A quick word: I’ve separated the list of eighteen deaths in Zion resulting from climbing, canyoneering, and BASE jumping from other kinds of falls in the park because these incidents involve a different set of skills and more significant risk. Technical climbing, scaling a sheer rock face, rappelling down a canyon wall, and actually jumping out into clear air stand out from the hiker who loses his or her footing and slips over the edge of a cliff. I am not a climber or canyoneer, so I will make no attempt to determine why these unlucky souls fell; if you want to participate in such discussions, plenty of websites speculate on the most recent of these cases.