5 Ways National Parks Will Kill You
There’s an anecdote that floats around lots of National Park-adjacent towns: A tourist is preparing to take their family out on a day-long hike, so they line up their kids and hit ‘em with the essential repellants: first the sunscreen, then the bug spray, then the bear spray.
If you’re not familiar, bear spray is a concentrated pepper spray designed to make a 600-pound grizzly reconsider a bloodthirsty rampage from 40-feet away. Topical application to a toddler isn’t recommended.
This story almost definitely never happened, but at its core is a universal truth. Locals will say that truth is: “Tourists are stupid and can’t be trusted with access to the wild.” Since we’re talking about real people who died here, I’ll be more generous: “Nature is fucking scary, and without the right equipment and research, it’s not too hard to die the bizarre death of an 18th-century pioneer.
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Over 300 people die on National Park land every year. Here are a few surprising deadly scenarios that tourists should keep on their radar…
Lethal Selfies
According to one study published in the Journal of Travel Medicine, the world saw 379 fatal selfies between 2008 and 2021. The main causes are oddly reminiscent of old black-and-white Western movies: drowning, falling off of cliffs, animal attacks. “Hit by a train” is actually the second-most common way people are killed taking dangerous selfies.
But American National Parks have far more breathtaking cliffs than Amtrak trains, so it’s those devastating falls that tend to take out visitors. In 2018 alone, a California woman slipped on some rocks at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, an Israeli teen fell from a waterfall in Yosemite National Park and an Indian couple fell from a scenic overlook in that same park.
Nuzzled to Death by Bison
Avoiding bison is surprisingly easy. Billions of people do it every day. But each year, one or two budding influencers are attacked by bison after venturing too close to get a sick shot for the grid.
This tourist caught a lot of flack last August, because someone caught a great video of her vapidly mugging next to a lumbering beast in Yellowstone National Park. She deserves every ounce of flack, too — she ignored signs that warn against approaching these gigantic puppies, she provoked it by her mere presence, and had it attacked her, it likely would have been euthanized. So, you know, fuck her. But she’s in luck, because the next tourist making bison-related headlines is always just around the corner.
That same season, a woman was gored by a charging bison, and although she and her companion appear to have been doing the right thing (hightailing it) at the time of the attack, she was hurt pretty badly (although, thankfully, survived).
Miraculously, only two people are reported to have died from bison attacks since Yellowstone’s founding in 1872. Bison account for the most animal attacks in Yellowstone, but the biggest danger in the park is less adorable, and more inanimate.
Boiled in Hot Springs
Hot springs’ body count is more than double that of bison and bears combined. Yellowstone is a literal minefield of geothermal activity. Imagine being a settler, fresh out of the mind numbingly flat plains of the Midwest. You suddenly find yourself in a jagged, rocky, freezing or sweltering dreamscape with toxic rainbow lakes and boiling geysers trying to Whac-A-Mole your whole wagon train.
Since Yellowstone became a park, and not just a portal to hell, 23 people have wandered off its boardwalks and died in its hot springs. Some of them will simply boil a person or an animal to death, but others, like the infamous Sulphur Cauldron, have the pH of a car battery or stomach acid, and will leave no trace.
Too Darn Much Water
If you don’t bring enough water on a long hike, you’re gonna have a bad time. But it’s too much water that can really sneak up on you. Let’s start with the frozen kind: Avalanches on National Park land have killed 37 people.
When all that snow thaws out, it gets significantly deadlier. Between 2014 and 2019, there were 314 drowning deaths in the parks, second only to motor vehicle accidents at 354. Those tend to happen when someone falls off a boat in a lake or a river, and they’re often selfie-assisted.
But the scariest water-related death, for my money, is flash flooding. The slot canyons of the Grand Canyon are enormous tributaries, geologically designed over millennia to collect rainwater from intense desert storms and deliver it to the Colorado River far below within minutes. This is as close to getting Jumanji’d as you’re likely to experience — your surroundings can change suddenly, disastrously and possibly fatally in a matter of seconds.
If you start to see the color of a river suddenly change, or increase in debris, you want to move to higher ground pronto. You can’t outrun a bison, but you can, surprisingly, outrun a flash flood.
Just Freaking Explode Everything
Let’s travel back to Yellowstone for a moment. The source of all that geothermal activity is our old friend, the Yellowstone Caldera. That’s a supervolcano lurking just beneath the surface that has erupted every half-million years or so, and is currently running 40,000 years late. Should the Great Pimple ever decide to pop — which it could at literally any moment — it’s estimated that 90,000 people would die instantly, and lava could splash from Calgary to Los Angeles.
So good luck getting a refund if your overnight at the Old Faithful Inn is canceled due to caldera eruption.
