4-year-old girl dies after falling off edge of Grand Canyon

4-year-old girl dies after falling off edge of Grand Canyon
By Associated Press

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK - A 4-year-old girl on a vacation trip to the Grand Canyon died Tuesday after slipping off the canyon edge and falling several hundred feet.

The girl fell near Mather Point just before noon and her father immediately scrambled down the cliffs to reach her, National Park Service spokeswoman Maureen Oltrogge said.

He started CPR, and a Park Service ranger who rappelled down into the canyon also began trying to resuscitate the little girl. A second ranger was lowered to the site by helicopter and determined the child was dead, Oltrogge said.

The child's body was recovered from a spot about 400 to 500 feet below the rim, Oltrogge said. The area where she fell is a combination of sheer drops of 30 to 50 feet, then slopes leading to more dropoffs.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_7128852

I am heartbroken...

RIP, sweetie....

:cry:

i went to the Grand Canyon about 8 years ago and i do not have a fear of heights but i will tell you that watching small children running around there had me just about hyper ventilating, i was scared shitless the whole time i was there because there is no guardrail in most places and children were running ahead of their parents, it was awful and i couldn't get out there fast enough.

i made my daughter "Walk on the inside, hold my hand, stay right next to me!" the whole time, she was almost 6 and i swear i wish i had a child leash with me, it was literally the wrost afternoon of my life.

stay AWAY from the edge. Older kids and dad made such fun of me, but I could see how easily a child could slip and fall. It was quite an ordeal, I have got to say.

Seems to me that Americans are so cavalier about their children's physical safety but suggest that we teach something about life...say sex education...and we're ON HIGH ALERT!!! :eyes:

to watch their kids no matter what age. Like the true morbid person i am i asked the ranger about the annual fatality rate and he told me--"around 19 annually, white male 17-28 demographic"

i don't think i would ever take a small child with me there.

100% of the suicide attempts lived, 100% of all accidents died. It has been long enough that those stats may have changed a little.

I went there severl years ago with my mother, brother and his wife. I was VERY uneasy and my IDIOT brother - would stand so close to the edge just to freak me out - and I'm begging my mother to make him STOP - oh by the way we were celebrating his 40th birthday....

He thought it was so FUNNY and I spent the whole time on the verge of nervous breakdown - NICE

My heart breaks for this little girl's parents and family....

Mine were in my husband's and my arms the whole time. :scared:

same reason. The guard rails on the American side just aren't enough to keep a small child away from the water.

I took mine there, but kept them one in a stroller the other holding my hand. Those guardrails on the US side are very old and don't offer much protection.

No need to not visit The Falls.

Tesha

Damn.

... just how stupid does a parent have to be to not know the Biggest Ditch in the world isn't a place for kids to play? Jesus! If someone waas building a house next door and dug the foundation, would the parent say "Go look at the big hole, kid"? Now make the hole a mile deep!

Hell, I'd put the kid on a harness and leash if it were mine and we were there.

place? So sad and so avoidable.

I mean, really

she had a scarf on and we were at this lookout point with just the guard rails. the wind kicked up and blew it off and she just about went over saying 'my scarf'
She was around that age when that happened.
wow. this just stopped me.

I love the canyon. it's just awful that such an amazing place can ever end up killing anyone.

Beauty and danger go hand in hand.


Toroweap Overlook, Grand Canyon


Angel's Landing, Zion


Half Dome, Yosemite

:cry:

I just took my 6 year old there this summer. I made it a point to keep her away from the ledgy places. Funny thing, someone mentioned how cavalier the American parents were? I found that the foreigners were far more cavalier about the ledges than the Americans were. That was my experience.

combined with an extreme naivete about risk. We make such an effort to remove the risk from everything that we assume that we actually have removed all the risks. There's no reliance on common sense. We all make fun of the ridiculous warning labels on everything, but at the same time people are constantly sueing because they did something stupid that they weren't warned about.

We were in Iceland recently, and we noticed that there were a lot of fairly risky areas with no guard rails or warning signs - people had to decide for themselves if it was safe or not. I actually started getting a little paranoid - I'd be walking up to a geyser or something and I'd wonder if I was doing something incredibly stupid that a common-sensical person would avoid; I realized how much I rely on warning signs, guard rails, rangers, etc. to tell me what not to do...

(This post is a broad-brush generalization, YMMV.)

Those warning signs and guard rails are primarily protection againt lawsuits.
Apparently Iceland is not as lawsuit-happy as the US.

if they saw some of the things that are so common over there, like a 2-3 year old kid hanging on behind mommy on the motorbike. No baby seat, no helmet, just "baby on the back."

Some of the trails we hiked on in the jungle were nothing more than a rope strung through the trees for you to follow. No path, no nice cement steps and wheelchair ramps; just whatever nature put there. The rope might go up a steep rock face, or across a river - it's up to you to decide whether to follow it.

I enjoyed it there, but I was amazed at how different things were in a place where lawyers and lawsuits don't dictate every action.

The poor parents must be going through hell. Hold your dear ones safe, people.

:cry:

If so you'd think they would know better.

They don't call it the Wild West for nothing. Even a simple hike can turn deadly out here...I've seen it all too often.Helicopters bringing bodies off the rocks.

How sad...poor little thing. What a horrible way to go,poor baby.
:cry:
DR

Those are shear cliffs. I just don't understand how that is physically possible, especially "400-500ft" below the rim.

I have no words except - why take a little one to such a dangerous place?

run through parking lots. Crap, if they aren't in front of you, you can't even see them. Honestly, I don't know what some people are thinking, not buckling themselves or their kids up in the car, turning them loose in the store to wreak havoc or possibly be kidnapped. It makes me crazy how cavalier some people are about thinking other people are supposed to watch out for their kids.

I wonder what the parents of this sweet little girl are saying about how this happened?

many, many years ago. A father sat his small son on the railing above the crocodile pit. The little boy fell in and the croc ate him. It was a huge animal and swallowed the child in one bite. Talk about stupid parents.

just horrible.

and insisted that I stay with them, hold their hands, etc. Two years ago my husband and I were out in Colorado and seriously thought about a side trip to the Grand Canyon but I took one look at our then 3 year old daughter and said no way. She was in the middle of one of the "if mommy or daddy says it, I'll do the opposite" phases. I was scared spitless that if we went, she would be injured. I could feel it in my bones. So we'll do it some other time when she is older. I am so sorry for this family and the little girl.

The last I was there, Mather Point had mesh fencing along the rails. Either a gap developed or she went around them.

I grabbed these pics of the net.

Awful.

Can't even imagine.

Peering over the edge, even from a safe distance, would send me into a panic.

Oddly, the fear of heights I experienced was coupled with a crazy desire to throw myself off the edge.

All it takes is one distraction--from a sibling, a spouse, you name it-- and a kid can be 30 feet away in the blink of an eye.

when we went to places where he could dart off, I had him in a harness. Yeah, yeah, I know some people find that objectionable, but I did it when we went to Maui and the Grand Canyon and London and other places. He really didn't mind it half as much as having his hand tightly grasped, and he was actually kind of used to it, because I used it when we started him skiing at 20 months. Stopped using it shortly before he turned 5.

all manner of high, cliffy mountains, buttes and gorges (a really nice one: Black Canyon of the Gunnison, in western Colorado), and I often thought I must have been insane to do so. My older son has always been afraid of heights, but my younger boy has tried to teeter himself over many a ledge, though my husband and I were pretty vigilant--makes me shudder now.

According to a study of all deaths at the Grand Canyon, it's adults who tend to fall there, and often they're doing really dumb things like taking risky photos or showing off. Most kids have better sense.

There's a great book about this called "Death at the Grand Canyon," by an E.R. doc who tabulated all deaths over the past century.