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Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite
Jun. 8th, 2021 12:49 pmI 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.
( Cut for the details )
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.
( Cut for the details )
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.