Death At The Grand Canyon

There’s been another death of a tourist at the Grand Canyon National Park.  The National Park Service is reporting that a 70-year-old woman fell about 200 feet from the rim of the canyon.  The incident is the second accidental death at the Grand Canyon National Park this year and the third death by a fall in the area.

In an article on the death, Grand Canyon park staff are reported to encourage all visitors “to have a safe visit by staying on designated trails and walkways, always keeping a safe distance from the edge of the rim and staying behind railings and fences at overlooks.”  That’s good advice, but it’s not exactly easy to follow.  The Grand Canyon isn’t fenced in, and the lure of getting close to the edge of the rim, to take in the canyon in all of its dizzying, magnificent vastness, is hard to resist.

When we made our visit to the Grand Canyon some years ago with the boys, I remember inching my way closer and closer until I thought:  “Okay, that’s really close enough.”  I was probably a foot or two from the rim, like the person in the picture shown above, but it felt like I was on the edge of the precipice, and I didn’t feel the need to have my feet touching the edge so I could look directly downward.  I also tried to keep the kids from going right up to the edge.  If you do that, you leave yourself no margin for error, and any stumble or misstep could send you plummeting to your doom.  And, if your attention to where you are carefully placing your feet is distracted because you’re taking a picture with your phone — which apparently is what happened with at least one of the fatal incidents this year — the chances of a horrible mishap are just increased.

If you make a visit to the Grand Canyon, Devil’s Tower, or other cliffs, canyons, or rocky outcropping sites out west, you immediately notice that there aren’t many fences.  Fencing in the sites would not be feasible because of their sizes and configurations, and would ruin the views, besides.  The National Park Service trusts people to be mindful of their own safety and to avoid taking stupid risks — but of course, the sites were developed in the days before cell phone cameras and people mindlessly moving around, without looking where they are going, to try to get the perfect shot.