“Knowing how the falls had received their picturesque name, however, did nothing to help the two soggy lovebirds from becoming one with this natural phenomenon.”
“He was a ‘popular’ student at the University of California. With social success often comes confidence, perhaps even over-confidence. Whether any connection exists between this and his next decision remains conjecture.”
“The girls looked around and decided that this photo was too tame.”
“Amazingly, it looked like the two were going to make it back onto the bank at the very last second before shooting over the edge. But no.”
“This is not to belittle the last doomed efforts of these martyrs, nor is it intended to discourage well-planned rescue attempts in the future. Instead, our pointing out that many rescues having resulted in double fatalities with no one being saved is a neon warning sign to those who would attempt such efforts in cold fast-flowing water, especially above a lethal waterfall.”
“He belatedly and suddenly recognized the peril.”
“I finally caught a glimpse of a small splotch of pink. It sat wedged at least four feet deep in a shadowy, eighteen-inch-wide crevice. Our luck had just turned. With the hook on the long pike, I finally was able to snare the body and tug it out by hand.”
“Maybe it was the lost kid’s body. Indeed it was. But the body greeted them weakly with a ‘hello.’”
“Maybe ‘slipped’ is putting it mildly.”
“He saw her, still on her back and apparently lulled herself, drifting along with the current toward the lip of Nevada Fall. He scrambled to his feet and rushed downstream. But too late. She floated serenely over the waterfall.”
“Snow is cold enough to kill.”
“Maybe computer video games have replaced the wilderness as a provider of fulfilling challenges.”
“The difference in elevation seemed to melt away — as did the butt of his new Levis jeans as he slid down the rough granite.”
“The two discussed this tactic and somehow agreed that leaping into this tree made sense.”
“Friendship matters, but speed kills.”
“He must have been engaged in moving his second safety anchor precisely at the moment when his partner detached the first one in error. It was an almost unbelievable case of incredibly bad timing.”
“Is it because the real world is so much more demanding to challenge than a computer game is?”
“Nod off for an instant and die.”
“Revealingly, every one of these fatal mistakes was made by a male — no woman in Yosemite is known to have shortcutted and paid for it with her life.”
“A solo hiker often has a fool for a companion.”
“It was only later that we learned this teenager had lit the damned fire himself.”
“He had walked right off of the sloping rock into nothing but fog and had fallen almost 400 feet.”
“A cry from inside the plane.”
“He obliged by hopping up and down and spreading his arms out over the water with even more exaggeration of a comical mishap about to happen. As he again pretended to fall, he actually did fall into the river and shoot over the falls into that very long drop into eternity.”
“After December 10, he had nothing left to eat except salted water.”
“Night fell. So did the temperature.”
“He bounced repeatedly into the cliff.”
“And what’s left of him is still out there.”
“Instead of dead bodies we ultimately recovered more than a ton of high-grade marijuana.”
“The two live BASE jumpers went to jail. Meanwhile, he went to the morgue.”
“She hit so hard her impact sounded like a sonic boom. It sounded shockingly explosive — so loud ‘it set off alarms of the cars parked at the Meadow.’”
“The only thing we found that was alive was a cinnamon teal duck I spotted that had been forced down onto the ground by the storm. I placed the duck in my front pocket.”
“It now dangled off her face by a thread of skin.”
“When finally confronted by frustrated (a mild term considering their actual condition) Park investigators, he cavalierly announced that the prospect of fatherhood had terrified him and he had wanted out…His plan to vanish off the face of the Earth via Yosemite’s backcountry to escape a spouse or the duties of fatherhood by “dying” and to then begin a new life elsewhere was neither an original thought nor even an original plan of action.”
“In short, we have become what would be referred to in biology as a domesticated species.”
oh my god why haven’t you bought this book yet
I want Edward Gorey to illustrate this post. I love this book so much.
If only he, too, weren’t dead.
Truer words have ne’er been spoken:
“Revealingly, every one of these fatal mistakes was made by a male — no woman in Yosemite is known to have shortcutted and paid for it with her life.”
I initially assumed that this would be my favorite excerpted quotation on the list, but no in fact it was:
“The only thing we found that was alive was a cinnamon teal duck I spotted that had been forced down onto the ground by the storm. I placed the duck in my front pocket.”
Too bad about all those men, you know? But we did save a cinnamon teal duck. As it should be.
Ooo! Ooo! Now do Death In Yellowstone!
BOILED ALIVE IN HOT SPRINGS! Reading that book made my hands spasm into terror-claws.
remember when the dude’s skin peeled off his foot LIKE A SOCK? (I mean, it might have been a lady. but… it was a dude.)
a formative book of my childhood, right there. <3
My favorite* was the woman who had the front half of her body scraped off by a bear because she was feeding it candy from hat.
*Favorite in that it is the one I mention when explaining to morons why bears are wild creatures and leaving them snacks is a bad idea.
I copy edited Death in Yellowstone! And it makes me squee every time I see it mentioned here…like I have had an impact on the world!
THANK YOU for what you have given the world. That book deserves a place of honor on every bookshelf.
Death in the Grand Canyon made me feel SO much better about refusing to hike down an icy trail with my friend, who was polite but clearly miffed when I freaked out.* Until she bought a copy of the book in the gift shop and I read passages of it to her on the ride back to Phoenix.
*In my defense, the woman walking between my friend and me slipped and skidded about 50 feet downhill on her ass. Totally warranted panic.
is that Papyrus?
it’s Papyrus.
I will read ANY book whose cover features Papyrus.
Nothing says “cult classic” like Papyrus font!
It’s pretty good to imagine these in the voice of the guy who narrates Unsolved Mysteries.
If you can think of a better way to drink in the woods around a fire, I’d like to hear it.
My preferred way to drink in the woods around a fire is to drink in my apartment around a television set.
“But no.”
This is my very. favorite. book series.
This looks possibly even better than
Love the mannered prose. I’d like to think these were compiled by a vicar in Derbyshire circa 1850.
I love the thinly veiled disdain in #2: “He was a ‘popular’ student at the University of California.” What a grandly executed use of scare quotes.
“He was a socially successful young man in California. He was, naturally, a complete asshole.”
I’d like to take a moment to put in a word for a staple of my childhood, entitled LAST BREATH: CAUTIONARY TALES FROM THE LIMITS OF HUMAN ENDURANCE. It’s by Peter Stark, and each chapter is a different method of death (my youthful self thrilled to see HYPOTHERMIA or DROWNING emblazoned across the top of a page), wherein he narrates a mostly-fictional short story about someone dying or almost dying from that cause, peppered with scientific asides about what exactly is happening to the body at that moment. Fascinating, educational, morbid, and the source of endless maudlin conversation starters (or enders, depending on your companions).
The chapter on scurvy is particularly bone-deep horrifying. Highly recommended.
As a wee child of 7 I accompanied my family to Yosemite as part of a California vacation. We stayed in one of those rustic cabins in the park.
The sole reading literature in our cabin was a pamphlet telling us HOW DANGEROUS IT WAS TO SWIM IN THE MERCED RIVER and we shouldn’t even think about it. To punctuate this point, the pamphlet featured an old-timey picture of a drowned person in a bathing costume, floating face down. Man? Woman? Not clear. Didn’t matter. Scarred me for life, or at least until I forgot about it. And now I’ve un-forgotten. Lovely.
Those pamphlets must have been placed by locals to scare away the tourists because I grew up there and we swam all the time when I was a kid. My mom worked in the park for a while, I wouldn’t put it past her. My mom might have been a Scooby Do villain.
“She hit so hard her impact sounded like a sonic boom. It sounded shockingly explosive — so loud ‘it set off alarms of the cars parked at the Meadow.’”
The book Ranger Confidential is by the ranger who found the body of that BASE jumper. She says there was a crater several feet deep where the body hit. And the words stepping in body fat were used. (The book is about the ranger’s experience at several different parks, Yosemite and Grand Canyon the two biggest ones.)
My great grandpa drowned while he was working in Yosemite. His name was Harry Johnson. Classic. Or maybe not because his Native family probably didn’t know they gave their son such a dickish name. I also don’t know if he counts because he lived there. Or if anyone in my family would count, what with the being native Yosemite Indians. I’d like to think that with the exception of good old Harry Johnson, they all stood there shaking their heads at all the stupid white men.
“The two discussed this tactic and somehow agreed that leaping into this tree made sense.”
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Adding “Park Ranger” to my list of Worst Jobs. I can’t even make it through Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants without developing weird phobias about poisoning myself with a salad. This sounds much more terrifying.
“Maybe it was the lost kid’s body. Indeed it was. But the body greeted them weakly with a ‘hello.’”
This one is some real horror novel shit. It’s the use of “the body” over the “the lost kid.” I’m over thinking it probably, but it implies that the kid is gone, and there’s only his body left, but there’s something wearing his body and saying hello. So creepy.
I copy edited Death in Yellowstone! And it makes me squee every time I see it mentioned here…like I have had an impact on the world!
Death in the Grand Canyon made me feel SO much better about refusing to hike down an icy trail with my friend, who was polite but clearly miffed when I freaked out.* Until she bought a copy of the book in the gift shop and I read passages of it to her on the ride back to Phoenix.
*In my defense, the woman walking between my friend and me slipped and skidded about 50 feet downhill on her ass. Totally warranted panic.
my feelings about what is happening here
If The Toast has a book budget, I suggest adding See Australia and DIE:Tales of Misadventure Down Under to the library. The prose is less pungent but the catalogue of horrors is nonstop. Admittedly, the book is best read during a jet lagged insomnia in my Melbourne guest room, but it has moments to rival Ghiglieri and Farabee.
ANAM occasionally gets some fun phrasing in, it's the source that permanently emblazoned "failure to belay thumb" in my brain: http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articl…