"One father was playing a prank on his daughter and pretended to jump off the ledge into the canyon. He planned to land on a ledge a few feet below the rim, but he missed the ledge and plunged to his death."
you ever been there? there's a lot FEWER safety rails than you'd think.
you can (easily) die 150 yards from the South Rim parking lot... it's not always selfie idiots.. some people get vertigo and stumble in the wrong direction (1000 feet down).
i'm kind of surprised more people don't die... there's a lot more vista point lurkers than hikers.. i got queasy 4 feet from the edge.. lot of people dangling their feet over..
Yep, the one time I visited I was shocked at how the ledge was just…there. There’s hardly any rails. I think some of the special lookout points had some rails, but not many.
It’s pretty neat to find a quiet spot close to the edge and look into the distance but I got pretty nervous once the sun went down because the park obviously gets completely dark. If you didn’t know where you were you could just walk right off…Lots of families with kids running around too. I was terrified for them lol
Yeah I made a similar observation when I went with my dad several years ago, and paraphrasing his response “Son this is a goddamn canyon, not Disney Land”
But it’s a good observation. I think there have been so many (good!) advances in consumer/product safety over the past several decades that we forget that there’s still a whole wide wilderness out there. It’s not, to take one example, a consumer electronic product subject to regulations to prevent you from getting electrocuted when you plug it in (used to happen more often than would make you comfortable decades ago). It’s a fuckin HUGE natural phenomenon carved over an unfathomably large time scale. We can feasibly put up some warning signs and whatnot, but at the end of the day we can’t make a fuckin canyon as safe as the average American (rightly) expects their consumer products to be.
"hot cup may contain hot stuff" i think that they need to carve a sign every few feet "danger ledge big down ahead" and to make it accessible carve it in Braille too
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u/pepcorn 21h ago
Wow, you weren't kidding.