Death in the National Parks

[balzaccom]

You might think it was lions, tigers and bears; or even rattlesnakes and scorpions. You might think...

But here's the answer, according to the National Park Service:

Car accidents

Drowning

Hiking misadventures

Read the whole story here:

https://www.mensjournal.com/news/nation ... e-of-death

[Gogd]

Lions, tigers, bears? Naw! The short list you share is pretty much the logical causes.

The biggest mortal danger, however, is the car ride from home to the park entrance. Getting to the Sierra is not as bad as it was in the days when Hwy 395 was mostly a 2-lane route and Hwy 99 was a 3-laner with the middle lane being a passing lane used by cars going in either direction. But still the long drive en route remains the biggest risk we take.

Ed

[dave54]

Those are boring. I would be ashamed to die that way.

I want my ultimate demise to be a "Hold my beer and watch this" event.

[Wandering Daisy]

I think there is a statistical mistake in these rankings. Car accidents and drowning include all the tourists, who well out-number backpackers or day-hikers. Take out those and I suspect the ranking may change. Each National Park has its own hazards. I doubt there are many drownings at Joshua Treek NP. I do not think it is valid to lump them all together. I think there are ways to get total death statistics for each park, but I doubt the front-country vs back-country deaths are separated.

What would be more interesting for us would be per capita death, excluding tourists, per location, per cause. There also was no note on natural deaths, such as heart attacks.

As for danger of driving to the trailhead, I think the statistics were only for deaths within the National Parks, which are a fraction of the miles most drive just to get to the park boundary. I think driving within the parks is pretty safe since the speed limits are so low. Driving accidents outside the parks are no different than you would have driving to any venue of activity.

What really shocked me was the number of suicides.

[paul]

In the article in National Paks Traveler that is referenced by the Men's Jornal article, it is stated that the overall mortality rate for the National Psks is 0.11 per 100,000, while the overall US rate is 715 per 100,000. Do the math and you find that it is 6,500 times safer to be in a national park than out of one! So the real takeaway is that we should all spend as much time in National Parks as we can, for our own safety.

[druid]

The National Parks Traveler article in turn references this informative nps.gov page: https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/mortality-data.htm which includes the ability to filter by park, activity, year, cause of death, etc. A quick look suggests that the number of suicides is correlated with being fairly close to a major metropolitan area and having something easily accessible to jump off of, as you might expect. There's no convenient way to display any of the numbers as a percentage of total visitors, but frequently-visited car-oriented parks like Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone unsurprisingly have the most motor vehicle fatalities.

All in all, I fully agree with Paul's conclusion.