People do risky things at the Grand Canyon. Kenneth Field mapped the consequences: 1 national park, 900 deaths.
Inspired by the book, Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, Kenneth Field created a map that helps tell the stories of more than 900 casualties in Grand Canyon through 2018. They are cartographers with more of a passion about maps than of death statistics so the result is artistic and experience-based rather than analytical. The map is unique in that it uses chromastereoscopic color which means it can be viewed in holographic 3D if you're wearing Chromadepth glasses. Red appears closest and blue appears the farthest away. You can view the map just fine without the glasses and you can even download a poster version to print.
On average, 11 people a year die at the canyon, with a fatality rate of about 1 in 2 million visitors.
The interactive map is at Carto includes details of each incident. Exploring it reveals a diversity of dangers, errors and mishaps; if anything, the Colorado river and the weather seem at least as dangerous as the cliff edge. Clusters far from the canyon are typically airplane crashes.
And then there's this:
3 victims died in this incident on or about August 30 1869. The incident occurred on or near Uncertain location either between Mount Dellenbaugh and Parashant Wash and the cause of death is described as [murder].
Dunn and the Howland brothers seperated from J. W. Powell's first exploration down the Grand Canyon Colorado on August 28, 1869, and hiked north. The three were murdered.
Source: Ghiglieri, M. P. and Myers, T. M. (2012) Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, Puma Press, Flagstaff
William H. Dunn, 30
Oramel G. Howland, 36
Seneca B. Howland
Here's an article about the men, explorers mistaken by a local Paiute band for the prospectors who had raped and killed a native woman.
[Expedition leader] Powell seems to have accepted the explanation, but more recently some historians have suggested the interpreter might have been lying. The Howlands and Dunn might have stumbled upon some of the Mormons who 12 years earlier had massacred 120 members of an Arkansas wagon train headed to California. The three men might have been mistaken for federal agents who were still seeking some of the killers.
Howlands Butte is named for the men; if anyone has BASE jumped off it, the footage isn't on YouTube.
