Over the Edge

This is a great book, especially if you are a hiker and have ever considered hiking in the Grand Canyon. It describes all the recorded deaths in the canyon, their causes, how they might have been prevented, and what can be learned from them. It’s a fascinating read and I guarantee you will learn something.

I, for instance, had no idea how prone the canyon was to disastrous flash floods–it’s how much of it was formed, even. And what’s worse, the rain that causes the flood can be happening more than 20 miles away. You can be sitting down in a bone dry culvert, in bright sunshine, when a roar like an approaching freight train begins and you have seconds to scramble to safety before a rolling wall of mud and debris engulfs you.

I also didn’t know that some people approach the edge and just fall over into it from vertigo, or from some other sort of mysterious attractive force that makes people flirt with death. Some people have even died in the old cliched picture-taking way: “That’s it…one step more, back up, back up…” Boom.

Oh, and that tourist-stop-dead-body-attraction that I mentioned in my previous post? That’s a picture of it, there in the lower right of the cover.