…and a teen was very, very lucky. He fell 75 feet, and is in ‘good’ condition in hospital, after having to be lifted out by rescue chopper.
There is, incidentally, a sign near the rim that says that that chopper ride is somewhere around 30,000 dollars, and you will be billed.
I have a book to recommend: it’s Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. Fascinating account of the effect the Canyon has on people, among other things, plus the history of the place. We had it for reading on car trips, and it’s well-written and just fascinating…especially the two missing boaters, which is a mystery that actually starts in Spokane. We picked up the book at a store at the Canyon, but Amazon has it.
Another of our very favorite car-trip books is Sons of the Profits: There’s No Business like Grow Business, which is a history of underground Seattle…the most outrageous set of characters that ever founded a city.
Both of these books are non-fiction, and can be read in small doses, great for reading aloud.
I think I saw something on PBS about a husband and wife couple who went missing while rafting in the canyon and when they went to look for them all they found was an intact raft but no people. I think there was a journal that was found too. Was that the same missing boatman related to Spokane? I can’t remember the time period. I want to say it was depression era, but that seems too soon. It was some kind of national interest much like those guys who tried to drive cross country for the first time or people who attempted to fly around the world. That period of time when people were trying to set records is really interesting to me.
Right now I am reading West into the Night by Beryl Markham (or her husband as some insist) which is a memoir about growing up in Africa back in the 1920s where she took up flying and horse training and mingled with the essentrics and big names who were running around Africa at the time. Ernest Hemmingway knew her and she likely slept her way through the British royalty and big names who passed through Africa. She was a very big character for the times and her memoir is extremely well written and recommended by her peers. It’s probably the best writing I’ve seen in ages.
That’s right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_and_Bessie_Hyde
It’s a very tangled mystery. Glen was an Idaho lad, learned what he knew about rafting on nearby rivers, and the story loops into Spokane and out again—Spokane sits only 10 miles from the Idaho border, and there is a building downtown that figures in his account. It’s like the Jack the Ripper story—unprovable now what happened, but it inspires book after book trying to solve the puzzle. Even this book offers one solution.
The stories vary—from misguided hikers and rafters in trouble, to the Hollywood starlet who obeyed the “Just back up a little,” from the publicity photographer.
Heh. Catastrophe: one of my favorite sub-genres. I recommend these 3 can’t-put-downers:
DEATH, DARING, & DISASTER: SEARCH & RESCUE IN THE NATIONAL PARKS by Charles R. “Butch” Farabee Jr.
DEATH IN YELLOWSTONE: ACCIDENTS AND FOOLHARDINESS IN THE FIRST NATIONAL PARK by Lee Whittlesey.
and that uber-classic of mountaineering survival: Joe Simpson’s TOUCHING THE VOID.
If you are interested in more about Glen and Bessie Hyde, the Brad Dimock book “Sunk Without a Sound” is reputed to be excellent. I’ve read other work by Dimock – who specializes in Grand Canyon history and is excellent at it, but haven’t got around to Glen and Bessie yet.
Wow! A whole new list of reading material. Every summer for the 20 years I lived in California I would take a 2-3 week backpacking trip. I have been in most areas of the Sierra Nevadas. One of my favorite books is Eric Blehm’s The Last Season about US Park Service Ranger Randy Morgenson. It’s a cautionary tale – no matter how experienced you are, not all is in your control.
Mmm. More books.
In Spokane, we live on the edge of wild country. It may look like superhighways where we are, but just keep walking, and you’re in bear and cougar territory, with deer, and moose, coyotes, and wolves…where I live, one mile from city center and in the heart of the city, not even in a suburb—I mean, these are houses that date to the 40’s, easily, interspersed with a few from 1901 and so on…this is NOT what you would call wilderness. But we have raccoons. I’ve watched a family of fat marmots trot down the street, and a day later, a coyote, just trotting down the pavement.
And once the trees close about you, and you’re out of sight of buildings and phone lines, you could be a hundred years ago, or five hundred or a thousand. You’re out there where a small injury could be bad news, and where the things that go bump in the night may well involve a bear.
That edge-of-the-wild character is one thing I love about this city.
And then I go to a place like Yellowstone, where they’ve had to put up wooden walkways to advise people that leaving the marked trail is really dangerous—uh, yes. I saw the park first in 1957, and don’t remember the extensive walkways, or perhaps I was just so excited I never noticed. But I’ll guarantee you I didn’t leave the roped off tracks. We didn’t know at that time that we were walking in the caldera of one of Earth’s most potent active volcanoes.
1957 was back when the bears still came up to the side of the road (sometimes, the middle!) and begged for hand-outs. Some folks thought feeding them from their hand was a fun thing. ‘Course, sometimes the bear had trouble telling the hand-ee from the hand-out.
That’s one of the disturbing things about people spending their lives in cities surrounded by technology. They expect the wilderness to be like what they see on tv. Which has some bad results: most of nature is much more boring than the edited version seen on nature shows. There are large amounts of time where, as someone much better at writing than I am said, the doe does not nuzzle the fawn, the hawk does not stoop, the lion does not bring down the zebra. I have had to put on my best “stern adult” manners to keep kids from throwing things at zoo animals to “make them do something” instead of just lying around in the shade. And, being surrounded by things built by humans, where the plants that grow are relatively hardy in order to survive in that environment, it’s hard to grasp just how fragile some ecosystems are. We can put up a building in a year, so how long does it take to get a coral reef? The weeds I pull this week are back next, so this little scrubby alpine plant will be back next week if I pull it up and take it with me (never mind that it might take 50 years for it to get to that little scrubby size). And, there is a total lack of understanding of how dangerous it can be to get lost. In a city, you can most likely find your way back home with nothing too major to be concerned about, so the absolute danger of getting lost in a forest is foreign to most people.
To get an idea of how some people are in real life, i recommend http://notalwaysright.com/ , stories submitted about customers. There are some from people who work at zoos and parks which are very interesting.
Here’s one that reminds me of Foreigner and Air Traffic Control.
http://notalwaysright.com/sin-number/6393
Lol!
And they’re out there among us….Ooooooooo…weeeeee…..ooooooo
On a somewhat related note, Arizona also has a “Stupid Motorist Law” which provides that people who ignore warning signs or remove barricades and cross flooded stream beds can be prosecuted and charged for the cost of a rescue, up to $2000.
Although it doesn’t rain often in the desert, when it does, it doesn’t soak into the ground but tends to run off quickly and swiftly. The desert thus has lots of shallow stream beds that are dry and empty all but a few days a year. Unless a road gets substantial traffic, road builders may not bother to install culverts and drains.
So, every time it rains, you can count on some greenhorn who has moved to Arizona from Chicago or Detroit to think he can drive across the wash bed that just filled up with what looks like only a few inches of water in his truck or SUV, and doesn’t have to pay any attention to “Do not enter when flooded” signs or barricades.
Wrong.
I very much remember being caught in the desert in a line of traffic, behind a travel-trailer that had completely destructed and strewed bits and pieces all over Route 66: everybody was stalled, and then came the cloudburst. We watched as the surrounding desert became a lake, and flowed toward us, and we were very glad there was a culvert to let that water through!
I’m not sure if the books and DVDs of Ray Mears are available outside the UK but for anyone interested in stories of how the outdoors can turn on you and how to keep your head and survive, they are excellent. I would recommend Ray Mears Extreme Survival series 1-3. Ray’s a leading ‘bushcraft’ expert and survival trainer. One of those who respects the environment and the local people and gets along with nature rather than having to prove how tough he is by killing and eating anything that crosses his path.
Just checked out his site: http://www.raymears.com/
Totally cool. Didn’t find him on netflix. Didn’t check Amazon. But if you’ve got a region free dvd player, you can get his dvds here.
Another site with a good, brief bio:
http://www.grannysstore.com/Wilderness_Survival/Ray_Mears.htm
Small piece of trivia. But he takes a copy of the Lord of the Rings with him on his travels and he was the “sponsor” for the LOTR in the BBC’s greatest book of all time poll.
I’m an Arizona kiddy from the Strip (area north of the Grand Canyon).
The basic survival techniques aren’t very hard to learn.
No water, no life.
Never drink water with no living things in it.
When you feel lightheaded you have to drink something Now.
You can see the highwater marks on the rocks around you
and you never get below them when there are black clouds
on the horizon. A flash flood can appear instantly carrying
rocks bigger than an automobile.
The wildlife is not your friend, this includes a large number
of quite spectacular insects.
Never climb on the slick rock (sandstone) alone.
If you look up and pay attention to where things are on the
horizon before you start out and follow your own footsteps
back you’ll never get lost.
People have died because they left their car and wandered away
dazzled by the beautiful scenery, became dehydrated and disoriented,
once lost they were doomed.
All of this is automatic for me, but city folk have to learn it
to be safe. The more obvious stuff like getting too close to the
edge of a canyon should be common sense.
The view from Kaibab is a wonder of the world, nobody should miss
it if they live in North America.
Since this sounds like a tourist brochure…GRIN
Fill your water jug, bring your camera and your sense of wonder
to a landscape that will make you think you are on an alien
world.
I love the Grand Canyon.
I’ll tell you one I learned when a kid in rattlesnake country. 1)wear boots 2)wear socks: every layer helps. 3) carry a walking stick. When you come to a step-over or step-down involving brush, a rock, or a fallen log, whack the ground as you approach, whack the step as you arrive, set the end of the stick down firmly before you step over, and pause a micro-second before following that stick-butt with your foot. 4) if your horse acts up, stay on the horse and let him go where he wants for a moment: he heard something you didn’t.
I watch people in movies blithely hiking along putting their foot in jeopardy in prime snake habitat, and I can’t even follow the plot line: I’m mesmerized by the thought of that rattler waiting for a mouse and having the daylights scared out of him by a big human foot in his strike-zone.
Being brought up in Australia we were taught never, ever step over a log, fallen branch, etc. Always step up onto it. It was sort-of essential because there are innumerable very poisonous snakes and spiders even in the Sydney suburbs.
Those of us of a certain age will remember all those B-western movies of yore, where the hero goes crawling(!) about in prime snake real estate. Since it is obviously the star and not a stunt man doing the crawling, I assume that the whacked around the area pretty thoroughly before letting John Wayne or William Boyd crawl through it.
In snake country you can’t let your mind drift even in fairly open areas. I can recall meeting a rattler snake beside a much used scenic trail in Palo Duro Canyon. This was an open stretch, no brush, logs or high grass. There we groups of people going by every few minutes.
The horse I used to use at gran’s was a bay cowpony named Bill. My idea of what to do as soon as possible on arriving was to saddle up Bill and head out. And one summer we had an absolute plague of grasshoppers. Well, a big grasshopper sounding off sounds a lot like a rattler, and poor Bill was having a miserable summer—on one occasion he turned to liquid under me and teleported sideways and I about died of fright: grasshopper, I’m pretty sure; and another one went off in the other direction. Bill took out like a shot and I just let him run til we hit the barren sandstone, where he and I could both recover.
Of course even more fun was the summer the farm had a plague of snakes—they were everywhere, in everything. Must’ve been mice the season before, because they reproduced like crazy. I wasn’t born yet.
Bad enough during my own experience on the place was my brother trotting into the farmhouse (he was about 4 or 5) asking for a flyswatter to kill a snake under the porch. Gran gave it to him and told my mother the cute story of the little boy out to swat an earthworm or some such. We hadn’t had many snakes that summer. I was standing there: Mum went seven shades of white and said, “He knows what a snake is!” and all of us lit out for the back porch where, you bet, my little brother was whacking a pretty sizeable snake with a flyswatter.
King snakes were friendlies. We all knew that. But my mother bundled us all into the house so fast I didn’t get an ID on that one, so I don’t think it was a king snake. 😆
When I was a child about 8 or so in rural southeastern Arizona, we lived in an old and not-too-well-sealed house where the desert wildlife didn’t always stay outdoors.
One day I found a snake curled up under the bathroom sink, apparently asleep. Having more fearful curiosity than sense, I tried to see if it had a rattle on its tail. It did. (Gulp.) My dad was at work and I think my mother was out for an hour or so (that wasn’t such a big deal, back in those days). By the time one of them came to check, anyway, the snake was gone.
Perhaps a few days later, I came home from somewhere to hear from an excited younger sibling that my uncle (then a teenager) had had a fight with a rattlenake in the kitchen and killed it with a shovel. I don’t remember the other incident with a rattler in the house, but my mother does…