Two veteran adventurers and employees who worked in the Grand Canyon compile the stories of all the many people who have died in the canyon and the diverse fates which have befallen them.
I visited the Grand Canyon about a decade ago, and I remember being struck by the sheer immensity of the landscape, as well as how colorful it was. My family and I just biked along the rim for a few hours, but always took plenty of care to keep away from the edge. Still, I hadn’t realized until I read this book the many dangers which lurk in and around the canyon for unwary tourists.
This is an absolute doorstopper of a book at over 900 pages, but the writing and stories are so compelling they sped by. The reader is the beneficiary of the authors’ experience, as they are able to gather primary sources for many of the stories they include in the book, and sometimes even discuss the cases and the rescues from their first-person experience. I also appreciated that after going over each chapter of deaths by specific causes, they broke down what we as visitors to the canyon can to do to avoid falling prey to the same problems.
A couple of the chapters are bit underwhelming – specifically the one about plane crashes, because of the cascade of statistics that we are struck with, as well as the one about homicide, because there are actually very few cases to cover, so the authors end up going a bit further afield in search of stories. The homicide chapter does close out with a doozy of a case, though.
