![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite
I decided to be morbid recently and pulled off my shelf Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite by Charles R. Farabee and Michael Patrick Ghiglieri. It is an account of every traumatic death in Yosemite since the discovery of the valley by white people in 1851 (that being the cutoff because of lack of records before). I bought this when I was in Yosemite and did what most people I’m sure do—looked at the table of death by cause and demographic, then read through the lists at the back of some of the chapters that list each death with a one-two sentence description.
I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to actually read the full 600-page book. One of the authors, Farabee, was an SAR park ranger for 34 years, 7 of them in Yosemite. When he retired, he decided to start accumulating a complete record of deaths in Yosemite as a side project as none such existed. This meant going through records from multiple counties, local newspapers, as well as park records (as incident reports only started in 1970). Ghiglieri is an academic with a penchant for outdoor activities, and prior to this published the very successful Death in the Grand Canyon. So I’m assuming the publisher at some point pointed him to Farabee and said—hey, this guy is putting the records together, go turn that into a book too.
So what I’m saying is, this is hack writing. I respect hack writing, having done it myself. The chapters that are on accidents that involve SAR are very good, as Farabee includes numerous accounts of SAR missions he was personally involved with—including many that did not end in death. Other parts of the book, though, are way out of their wheelhouse, and sometimes it’s pretty clear they were just making page count.
- There is a 30-page section on the founding of the park and the fight over the rights to Hetch Hetchy in the guise of then telling us about the deaths in building the dam there.
- In the animal attack chapter, there is a ten-page section titled, “Bears.” Do you know how many people have been killed by bears in Yosemite? Zero. I’m guessing the editor wanted a Bears section so people would pick it up, flip to that, skim and see descriptions of attacks, and buy the book. But this whole section is about attacks in OTHER PARKS.
- The chapter on those who went missing in the Park and were not found is similarly fluffed. It goes into a philosophical discussion of the dangers of getting lost, then starts talking about weird things that have happened in other Parks. There’s only so many times you can write “this person left their camp in the morning and was never seen again.”
- By far the most excruciating chapter to read was on Homicide. First because about half the homicides were the result of the period of white invasion and massacre of the Miwok. These authors do not have the range for this topic. For a lot of the accounts of deaths, they just quoted from local newspapers at the time, slurs included, with no acknowledgment that the newspapers were maaaaaaybe a little biased. The remaining section is on murders in the park and this is some bad true crime writing. I kept calling bullshit on unquestioned police accounts (like that they have attributed some bones found in the park and never identified—with cause of death not identified—to a serial killer based solely on his confession and that he recalled leaving some trash at the site and OH LOOK THERE’S SOME TRASH AT THE POPULAR OVERLOOK HE MUST HAVE DONE IT). There is lots of use of the words heinous and twisted. It’s really badly written is what I’m saying.
- The authors get way out of their comfort zone in the conclusion and a few other places as well when they try to draw general conclusions from all the data. These analyses are, to put it mildly, fatuous. It's VIDEO GAMES. MODERN MAN HAS DOMESTICATED HIMSELF. WE AREN'T HOMO SAPIENS ANYMORE. I actually wondered aloud to S if a career park ranger could be a libertarian.
But the reason anyone picks up a book like this is that they want to know how likely it is that they will die in the park. And the answer is—really, really unlikely. In 2019, 5 million people visited Yosemite. And each year, 10-30 people die traumatic deaths (as opposed to natural causes, ie, heart attack). And among those traumatic deaths, you have car accidents, plane crashes (because flying a small plane over the Sierra Nevada in a storm sometimes leads to hitting a mountain) and things like the very high death rate building the Hetch Hetchy Dam, or the murdering of Miwok people in the nineteenth century.
Most people want to read about accidents, though—and the four chapters on Waterfalls, Scrambling, Rock Climbing, and Drowning are the best written in the book. As Farabee points out in the intro, though, these aren’t really “accidents” so much as “rare outcomes.” That is, not everyone who scrambles off trail on steep cliffs dies, but it’s entirely predictable that doing that will lead to death. In these sections, it’s pretty clear that this is a SAR ranger’s plea to people to stop making the same stupid mistakes over and over. The majority of these deaths are, predictably, young men. So much so, the author started referring to it as “Semi-Vertical Terrain Testosterone Poisoning.”
So in conclusion, if you are the sort of person inclined at all to read a book on traumatic deaths in the park, stick to the chapters on Rock Climbing, Hiking, and Waterfalls and give the rest of the book a miss. I’m not going to lie, though—it does at times feel like reading Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to actually read the full 600-page book. One of the authors, Farabee, was an SAR park ranger for 34 years, 7 of them in Yosemite. When he retired, he decided to start accumulating a complete record of deaths in Yosemite as a side project as none such existed. This meant going through records from multiple counties, local newspapers, as well as park records (as incident reports only started in 1970). Ghiglieri is an academic with a penchant for outdoor activities, and prior to this published the very successful Death in the Grand Canyon. So I’m assuming the publisher at some point pointed him to Farabee and said—hey, this guy is putting the records together, go turn that into a book too.
So what I’m saying is, this is hack writing. I respect hack writing, having done it myself. The chapters that are on accidents that involve SAR are very good, as Farabee includes numerous accounts of SAR missions he was personally involved with—including many that did not end in death. Other parts of the book, though, are way out of their wheelhouse, and sometimes it’s pretty clear they were just making page count.
- There is a 30-page section on the founding of the park and the fight over the rights to Hetch Hetchy in the guise of then telling us about the deaths in building the dam there.
- In the animal attack chapter, there is a ten-page section titled, “Bears.” Do you know how many people have been killed by bears in Yosemite? Zero. I’m guessing the editor wanted a Bears section so people would pick it up, flip to that, skim and see descriptions of attacks, and buy the book. But this whole section is about attacks in OTHER PARKS.
- The chapter on those who went missing in the Park and were not found is similarly fluffed. It goes into a philosophical discussion of the dangers of getting lost, then starts talking about weird things that have happened in other Parks. There’s only so many times you can write “this person left their camp in the morning and was never seen again.”
- By far the most excruciating chapter to read was on Homicide. First because about half the homicides were the result of the period of white invasion and massacre of the Miwok. These authors do not have the range for this topic. For a lot of the accounts of deaths, they just quoted from local newspapers at the time, slurs included, with no acknowledgment that the newspapers were maaaaaaybe a little biased. The remaining section is on murders in the park and this is some bad true crime writing. I kept calling bullshit on unquestioned police accounts (like that they have attributed some bones found in the park and never identified—with cause of death not identified—to a serial killer based solely on his confession and that he recalled leaving some trash at the site and OH LOOK THERE’S SOME TRASH AT THE POPULAR OVERLOOK HE MUST HAVE DONE IT). There is lots of use of the words heinous and twisted. It’s really badly written is what I’m saying.
- The authors get way out of their comfort zone in the conclusion and a few other places as well when they try to draw general conclusions from all the data. These analyses are, to put it mildly, fatuous. It's VIDEO GAMES. MODERN MAN HAS DOMESTICATED HIMSELF. WE AREN'T HOMO SAPIENS ANYMORE. I actually wondered aloud to S if a career park ranger could be a libertarian.
But the reason anyone picks up a book like this is that they want to know how likely it is that they will die in the park. And the answer is—really, really unlikely. In 2019, 5 million people visited Yosemite. And each year, 10-30 people die traumatic deaths (as opposed to natural causes, ie, heart attack). And among those traumatic deaths, you have car accidents, plane crashes (because flying a small plane over the Sierra Nevada in a storm sometimes leads to hitting a mountain) and things like the very high death rate building the Hetch Hetchy Dam, or the murdering of Miwok people in the nineteenth century.
Most people want to read about accidents, though—and the four chapters on Waterfalls, Scrambling, Rock Climbing, and Drowning are the best written in the book. As Farabee points out in the intro, though, these aren’t really “accidents” so much as “rare outcomes.” That is, not everyone who scrambles off trail on steep cliffs dies, but it’s entirely predictable that doing that will lead to death. In these sections, it’s pretty clear that this is a SAR ranger’s plea to people to stop making the same stupid mistakes over and over. The majority of these deaths are, predictably, young men. So much so, the author started referring to it as “Semi-Vertical Terrain Testosterone Poisoning.”
So in conclusion, if you are the sort of person inclined at all to read a book on traumatic deaths in the park, stick to the chapters on Rock Climbing, Hiking, and Waterfalls and give the rest of the book a miss. I’m not going to lie, though—it does at times feel like reading Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.