Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon

[rachelmanija]

I am browsing a book on accidents in the Grand Canyon, blurbed by Tony Hillerman. It combines apparently solid reporting with extraordinarily melodramatic asides. I just now hit the section on incidents involving venomous creatures (very rare) which says people's fears of them are overblown and they shouldn't think of them as "death-slaves of the Grim Reaper."

Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon

Comments

[isis]

Title and author? I think this is relevant to my interests.

[ivy]

The same authors did "Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite", which I liked about as much as I liked "Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon". Farrabee also did "Big Walls, Swift Waters", which is more of a coffee table book about Yosemite Search and Rescue, rather than an informative-to-encyclopediac list of all the deaths. I liked it less well, but people who aren't SAR themselves sometimes disagree with me on that.

[rachelmanija]

Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon by Michael Patrick Ghiglieri and Thomas M. Myers.

[tazlet]

There is also a "Death in Yellowstone" - idiots keep wandering off the walkways and get dissolved. Nor are Buffalo cuddly.

[rachelmanija]

I know those were nearly all death by stupidity (the Grand Canyon book keeps annoyedly noting that once again, most deaths are men and due to failure to heed warnings or exercise common sense like "poisonous snakes are not for kissing on the lips"), but some of those stories were so horrific that I think I can live happily never visiting Yellowstone.

[tazlet]

How hard is it to obey the signs and stay on the boardwalk? Worked there when I was in college and we were not nice about fools like the touron who put honey on his hand to take a cute picture with a bear. But then I'm a ranger's daughter, and YP can be sublime.