I Read Death, Daring, and Disaster, Because People Keep Dying in National Parks and I Want to Know about it

Death, Daring, & Disaster - Search and Rescue in the National Parks by Charles R. "Butch" Farabee Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is probably more of a deep-dive than most readers would want, especially if you were mostly interested in deaths and extreme rescues in a specific park. For the best deep-dive into deaths in specific national parks, I’d recommend the Death in series. Out of all the volumes, I’ve only read Death in Yellowstone, but that one is SO good and I still quote it all the time. I even once made a small detour to visit a couple of bear cubs mentioned in that book--they’re now residents of a very nice zoo, and I’m sure they don’t even remember that time when they were babies and they ate literal humans.

However, if you’re also very interested in specific types of misadventures across the national parks, then this book is perfect as a round-up of all of them (and could really use an Index for that!). For instance, I enjoy reading about misadventures while caving, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that one of the first recorded misadventures would be in Sequoia National Park, the story of a soldier discovering Lost Soldiers Cave in 1909 or 1910 and then promptly disappearing into it. The cave itself was apparently then lost for nearly 40 years before being rediscovered. I think this is the cave that is now referred to just as Soldiers Cave on the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park site, and that site also doesn’t say anything about this origin story… or if the remains of that original lost soldier were ever discovered!

It was also easy to get drawn into dramatic stories I’ve never before heard about, like the time in 1941 that part of a squadron of P-40 Warhawks crashed in Kings Canyon National Park. Four pilots died and four bailed out over the High Sierras--and then two bombers also crashed while searching for survivors! The wrecked plane of one of the survivors was eventually found, and there are anecdotes online about casual hikers perhaps finding other pieces of wreckage, but some planes are still officially missing. THIS is the kind of stuff that I find so interesting--imagine not even just actual humans, but actual AIRPLANES, we know exactly when they crashed, we know approximately where they crashed, and we still can’t find them! Blows my mind.

Okay, this story made me cry: in 1959, a park ranger in Glacier National Park got word that a grizzly bear was literally currently in the act of eating a hiker. So he ran over there, found that indeed, a 250-pound grizzly bear was eating a guy, tried to scare the bear away, couldn’t, and so instead he risked his own life to shoot the bear, even though this was super risky because what if the bear turned on him instead, or what if he shot the hiker? He did shoot the bear without shooting the hiker, though, rendered first aid, directed the rescue operation, and the hiker lived. I was curious about this story, so after reading it I Googled to see if there was more info, and y’all, here is where I started crying: fifty years after this event, Ranger Dayton and the bear attack survivor had a reunion! This post tells even more about that day and what followed. 

Okay, but then after all that I had to double-check that afterwards, Ranger Dayton had continued on in peace and happiness with no further crazy events. HOWEVER, he was actually the superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns during that time in the 1970s when terrorists tried to take it over, so yeah, he’s had himself more than his fair share of adventures.             

Here’s a photo of Ranger Dayton. I’m a big fan.

There are also some really awful stories, like the dentist who got caught in a blizzard on Mount Rainier with his two children and died saving their lives by blocking the entrance to the snow shelter they’d dug. Three mountain climbers, including a nine-year-old, died after falling into a snow cavern in Grand Teton National Park, causing an avalanche that buried them up to their necks in snow, and then drowning when that avalanche dammed the stream that was running through the cavern. Another mountaineer actually jumped into the cavern right after them but couldn’t save them because they were buried so deeply, and reading his report of how he kept trying to pull the nine-year-old out of the snow by his helmet and his little jacket while having to witness him drown was so awful. There are some photos here. 

One more interesting through-line is how every now and then the families of someone who has died because of their own carelessness in a national park have sued the national park service… and won?!? In 1993, two of the chaperones of a Mormon Church Explorer Scout group died when they led their kids through an extremely risky route that nobody had the training to do. Their families sued and got 1.49 million dollars. I was also an Explorer Scout that year, and Sergeant Martin would NEVER have put us in danger like that.

A lot of the stories are actually reprints of news articles of the time, which made the book a little more challenging to read, as the tone and style often changed, but I really liked seeing how each event was reported within its own particular cultural context. There were several block quotes that were harder to figure out the provenance of, which would be more problematic for citation, but didn’t bother me as a casual reader. To add to the confusion, sometimes the included photos related to the specific event being described, sometimes they depicted a similar event, and sometimes they didn’t seem to be chronologically or thematically relevant at all. I loved the photos, but I definitely wanted a clear, concrete association between each photo and the event it recorded. 

Honestly, what I think this book wanted to be was an encyclopedia. It has all the great stories, but it’s not the most pleasant experience to read cover-to-cover. But if it had a keyword index and more graphics and citations, it would be a stellar reference for one of my favorite Special Interests.

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Day 7 in New Zealand: To the South Island, and Then We Kept Going South

Time has no meaning, because honestly it was zero problem to hop up at 4:15 am and drive through a sleeping Wellington to the Interislander Ferry. 

Really, I preferred it. There's no traffic to fight at 4:15 am!

My favorite thing about riding in a ferry is how well you're herded. I genuinely love nothing better than driving nose to tail at 3 miles per hour in a single line, and at every decision point there's a friendly figure in a high-vis vest to tell me exactly what to do. It's so stress-free not to have to think for myself!

I'm not much of a sailor, and I'd heard that the Cook Strait can be very rough, so as soon as the captain came on the intercom and said that our passage would "not be optimal," omg I started popping the Dramamine like they were Pez.

Not so my beloved and loving partner. Just as he does in every situation in which his spouse might desire comfort, entertainment, and distraction (*cough, cough* 14-hour flight *cough*), he found a seat, sat in it, and proceeded to fall deeply asleep, ne'er to awaken until the announcement came 3+ hours later that it was time to get back to our cars:

We have barely pulled out of the dock, and the man is sound asleep.

Fortunately, we had a bit of time before we actually entered the Cook Strait for me to enjoy myself:

Eventually, however, they closed the outside deck and began to make periodic announcements that people should vomit in a baggie and not in the ferry toilets, and so I spent the next good long while sitting at the furthest window forward and watching the bow go up and down, periodically overdosing on Dramamine and thinking VERY firmly to myself that I was not going to vomit.

Also, I'd left my earbuds in my other fucking bag. Not all adventures are pleasant!

Also also, Cook Strait IS genuinely notorious. I wasn't just being a baby!

I swear to god I about kissed the ground when we arrived in Picton, but above all, we must carry on with the sightseeing, so rather than engage in my most preferred activity of the moment, which was to die, we instead bought some Christmas candy at a local candymaker, and did a wine tasting and bought some wine at a local winemaker:

I actually just finished that bottle of wine a couple of nights ago, and I miss it! I don't normally love white wines, but this one was very nice. Also, fun fact: instead of a tasting room, the New Zealand wineries have a "cellar door." More semantic translation fun!

So... it may have been after-effects of the seasickness, or it may have been jetlag, or to be honest I definitely overdosed on Dramamine in an anxious panic there on the Cook Strait, so it may have been that, but after we got back in the car I dunno what happened for a good long while. I just sort of greyed out, and when I was back online we were on the coast!

Did we even eat lunch at some point? I really have no fucking idea. All I really recall from the entire drive from Hunter's Winery to the coast is that in this rental car, every time we turned it on it would connect to my phone via Bluetooth, which was AWESOME because there was a screen that would display my Google Maps on the dash for my partner to see. Do newer American cars do that, too? I wouldn't know, because our personal American cars are a billion years old, ahem. Anyway, when it did that, it would also for some reason connect to my Spotify and just start playing the Fleet Foxes radio playlist, which... is fine, I guess? I mean, it was almost Thanksgiving at that point, which means that White Winter Hymnal is pretty much required daily consumption. But also, that playlist is less than three hours long, and it came on EVERY time we started the car, and played continuously the entire time we were in the car, and the couple of times I tried to turn it off, or even to change playlists, it fucked up the GPS so my partner suddenly couldn't see where he was going in the middle of traffic, so I eventually was too scared to touch it and we just listened to Fleet Foxes radio whenever we were in the car. So ANYWAY, I'm not sure what else happened during that drive, but what I recall from it is just sort of a Fleet Foxes, and Fleet Foxes adjacent, sense memory. 

This Vampire Weekend song is very good, by the way. I heard it maybe 1,000 times over the nine days we were in New Zealand?

Oh, you know what, you guys? I have literally just had the realization that I probably should NOT have chased 3+ Dramamine with a couple of glasses of wine at 11:00 am. Whatever, it's fine. Neither of my travel companions can remember whether or not we had a proper lunch that day, either, and neither of them were compromised.

By the time we reached the trailhead for the Cape Foulwind Seal Colony Lookout (three and a half hours later, ahem...), I was more or less fine-ish and ready for a nice hike in the brisk fresh air!

The hike was almost exactly as was described--there were no "foul" winds (although it was VERY windy... was that what they meant by "foul?"), but there were rocks, and there was a lookout, and from the lookout, we could see seals on the rocks!

There is no soap opera that can match the drama of seals fighting over nothing on their rocks:

The drive down the coast afterwards was breathtaking (my partner states that the drive across the island was also breathtaking, particularly the part that followed the river, but I have no memory of this), and we got to our last stop at Punakaiki at just the right time, right at high tide so we could see the blowholes near the Pancake Rocks:

Lol at the photo below, because I was fighting for my life on those stairs!

Our hotel was in a beautiful spot sandwiched between the cliffs and the beach, and the kid and I had a lovely, long walk along that beach before it started spitting down rain again. We had a delicious, hot pub dinner, long, hot showers, and we were going to try to find a movie on the local cable, but I fell asleep before it even got started.

Tomorrow, we see the glaciers!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Rotorua

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Day 6 in New Zealand: All Things Wellington

The early bird gets to take troll photos in front of Weta Workshop without a bunch of tourists in the way!

It turns out that you can never know another person completely, because how did I not know that my spouse of 20+ years was this interested in movie special effects? He had SO much fun in New Zealand checking out filming locations and props and, especially, booking us for this tour of Weta Workshop in Wellington:

I'm into the books, not the films, but I'm very into crafting, and I also thought these spots were very interesting because of all the fine details that Weta Workshop puts into them. When you zoom in on any part of the giant troll statues, for instance, you can see all kinds of picky details--bloodshot eyes, runny noses, wrinkles, scars, chapped lips, chipped teeth...

Even broken toenails!

Every element felt handcrafted with equivalent attention to detail:

Before the tour, we got a chance to bop around the gift shop, where I did some more damage to the tune of a gorgeous box set for the younger kid:

Reading aloud The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a family are some of my sweetest memories!

You can't take a ton of photos inside the tour, but they did have a few older pieces laid out for people to photograph--

--or play with, ahem:

They had some mock setups to illustrate the types of materials the designers use and their work areas, and I thought those were the most interesting displays on the tour:

And they had a designer talk to us about the joys of sculpting with aluminum foil and cement clay, and we all got to make our own little aluminum sculptures for him to admire!

My little aluminum foil dragon head is delightful, I was assured, and he made it *almost* all the way back to Indiana with me...

Having been warned that parking is tight near Weta Workshop, we'd parked in a neighborhood several blocks away, and after the tour, the gift shop, and breakfast and flat whites in a nearby cafe, we were happily chatting and walking back to the car, when all of a sudden my partner, of all people, randomly shouted a greeting at a total stranger across the street!

The kid and I were MORTIFIED. This had never before happened to us in all our time together. Had he gone mad? Was he in an altered state of consciousness? Had their been psilocybin in the coffee? There is no way he knew anyone on the sidewalk in Wellington, New Zealand!

Except that yes, he did apparently know someone on the sidewalk, or at least, he recognized someone. That random dude was one of the two co-founders and owners of Weta Workshop, just walking casually to work, and he seemed happy as pie to return the shouted greeting of his biggest fan.

After that shock to my system, I clearly needed to spend the next several hours in my happy place: a museum!

The Te Papa museum was an excellent companion to our Maori cultural experience, because it had alllll the rest of the history and geography and culture you'd want for filling in the gaps. I loved EVERYTHING.

Check out this giant chunk of wood:

You can see choppy marks on it that are from an ancient adze.

And here are some other archaeological finds, including tools made from now-extinct animals and items imported from surrounding islands:

One of the things that I found very interesting is the fact that the museum had on display just the absolute porniest Maori art, presented completely without commentary on how porny it was:

Ahem.

Look how big the oars for the biggest boats are!

This model is a better look at the Maori dwellings than I was able to get at the Mitai Maori Village. They're purposefully half-sized with the even smaller doors so that even caregivers with small children inside can easily defend them.

All the pounamu jewelry is also really special:

We'd seen a couple of protests during our trip--and apparently just missed a large one in Wellington--so this exhibit on the (purposeful?) mistranslations of the Treaty of Waitangi that the British colonizers used was really interesting:

The British and Maori translations of the same document have actual different meanings. So, like, YEAH the Maori are mad about it!

Peeped out the window to make sure the car hadn't been snatched and ugh, it's pouring. It was sunny earlier!

Some of my other favorite artifacts include this wool and hibiscus bark cloak from around 1870--

--this shockingly on the nose translation of Moana's name (I was similarly startled at the Mitai Maori Village when our guide told us that the Maori word for the chicken we were about to eat is "heihei")--

--this super cool navigational tool--

--confirmation of the piece of random information that I always announce whenever I'm watching Moana with somebody but I could never remember where I heard it from and therefore nobody every believed me... UNTIL NOW!!!--

--and one of my perennially favorite artifacts to find, children's embroidery samplers:

Taking a moment to celebrate our own journeys to this place!

Taxidermied kiwis! None of these guys are as round as the ones we saw at the Otorohanga Kiwi Center:

I was charmed when I first learned that a weta, as in Weta Workshop, is a cave cricket. Here are a couple of those weta!

Albatrosses had been on the kid's must-see list in New Zealand, but she saw SO many of them from her ship before she even got here. She said that they looked just like these, though!

And here's my new nearly-favorite animal: the moa!

This moa egg fragment was found at a Maori burial site:

Downtown Wellington is pretty walkable, so when we were done with Te Papa we just left our car in the museum lot and went for a wander on foot. 

You might remember that the younger kid is obsessed with David Bowie, yes?

Well, Wellington apparently is, too!

One of the items on my to-do list was to visit Choice Bros. and, along with having a couple of pints for ourselves--

--I bought a can of Rebel Rebel to take back home for my kid:

This world in which we each have a complimentary checked bag is SUCH a different world from backpacking it back and forth to England a couple of years ago!

We made kind of a DIY downtown food tour for ourselves, filling up on wings and pints and ice cream--

--then slogged through the rain back to the car and made one last stop at the grocery store for a packed breakfast for the next day.

Because come tomorrow morning at 5:00, we'll be on a ferry across the Cook Strait!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!