George Knapp Gripping Accounts of Disappearances, Myths, Lore at Grand Canyon

hello and welcome to coast to coast am official YouTube channel I'm your host George Noory like share and subscribe to our Channel and you can also find us on Facebook Twitter and Instagram and of course on coast to coast am calm we are taking a little road trip for the rest of this program tonight a trip to one of the most beautiful places in the world the Grand Canyon with along with somebody who knows it as well as maybe anyone are alive Michael Gilly arey is a he had an amazing life as a world traveler he is the great grandson of a 49er he served in the US Army as a sergeant during the Vietnam era earned a PhD in ecology in 1979 that did some pioneering research with wild chimpanzees in Uganda he studied primate behavior and ecology all over the world in Kenya the Turks and Caicos in Queensland Vancouver and since 1974 has run more than 660 commercial whitewater trips and trucks and Ethiopia in Kenya New Guinea Peru Rwanda all over the world including 140 plus two-week rowing and paddling trips through the Grand Canyon covering some 43 thousand miles of river overall the Grand Canyon of course is a is one of the natural wonders of the world that draws about five million visitors a year some of those people don't come back and mostly it's from their own stupidity as told in Michaels book over the edge death in the Grand Canyon some gripping stories about crazy crazy things that people have done in the canyon we're gonna talk to Michael right after this on coast to coast am welcome back over the edge death in the Grand Canyon co-written by Michael Guillory and Thomas Myers has some amazing stories about people who have done some really crazy things in the Grand Canyon it includes the book includes a quote from an early explorer who said something to the effect that and now that I've got out of this Canyon I can't imagine anyone being crazy enough to go back in there again I predict that nobody will ever visit it again and boy they couldn't be more wrong Michael great to have you on the show yeah thanks for having me that quote who's that from who said that guy named Joseph Ives who was not really in glory but that's what he became he's a lieutenant in the Army in the 1850s before the Civil War and he was hired by the US government to go up to Colorado River from the Sea of Cortez and actually made it to the foot of Grand Canyon and went over land with some Indian guides across the whole Coconino plateau into eastern Arizona and then up to Fort Defiance because it's actually quite an amazing trip and the quote that you amazed basically about the region he walked across on the plateau because there was no water is still no water there what you'd you know dig a well and so he was saying then no one will ever show up here again you know this is places a wasteland can you uh can you give me sort of a broad overview of the hold that the Grand Canyon has on people I imagined you know it as well as anyone I suspect that maybe it the totality of it is unknowable because it's so vast and it changes but talk about sort of the how people react when they go there and and if somebody in our audience has not been there why they should go um that's the tricky one you know the the actual hold is the allure of Grand Canyon has changed over the years and and I think over the decades and I think early on and and I don't mean the 19th century I mean in the you know 1960s let's say people under Grand Canyon because they were aware that it was one of the seven natural wonders of the world it was America's most famous Park certainly Yellowstone and Yosemite were are really well known but the most bizarre landscape in North America is Grand Canyon and there's something you had to see well now it's something had to see I think it's more on social media like you know you can brag about it on Facebook you have to have it on your bucket list and so on so I think the the reason that some people go is much more trivial than it used to be but it's virtually even people who drive or fly or make their way to Grand Canyon somehow and stand there on the rim South Forum village and look over and go out it's a big hole really are not aware of what they're seeing in terms of the the absolute magnitude and and one way I like to express that I guess would be while you're looking on the other side and the farthest it goes is 20 miles before the other rim and average is about ten miles across and when you're standing on the rim with you know the hordes of tourists you can see maybe ten miles across and 10 miles of links and the idea that it's actually 277 miles long is it's it's impossible to conceive or even visualize when you're staring at it so as people learn gosh you know it's a lot bigger than what we see right now and it looks really big what we can see it's a slow dawning of that whole idea that a thing is gigantic a thousand cubic miles of the missing rock in there you've been all over the world seeing some of the most beautiful places does it still grab you it still grabs me it does in different ways because uh like anything else if you have a certain history it's positive or negative certain part for me now every section of the canyon from Lee's ferry at the very beginning at mile zero to the other end every section has some sort of personal connotation some of which is is great and some which is less than great because certain things have happened there or because the wind always blows upstream or whatever and so yeah I have really strong personal feelings about the canyon still but they've evolved over time due to you know I've actually spent seven full years of my life in that Canyon on trips and there are seven years a long time and so a lot of events can happen in those seven years and and so for some reason around every bend of the river there's I don't necessarily remember each event but they have an emotional connotation in that location like oh yeah this is I got to get past this spot or we should just stop here I can relate to that I I know after living in Las Vegas and being a news guy for so long that you drive down any Street and you remember there was a murder there a car accident a body was found the bombing something like that I can relate yeah so right these trips that you've taken two weeks at a time how many people on a trip and and how to describe those oh the trips these days that we take or 15 days long and trips that I do a rowing trips there are there are other ways to do it there are motor trips with really large boats that hold 16 or more clients and there are paddle boat trips that one or two companies do that have six people on a boat and they're all paddling which sounds fun until the wind blows upstream and it always you know every trip it's going to blow upstream not all the time but and we do rowing trips with four people on both this 18 feet long they're inflatable boats we also run Dorries which are kind of a knockoff the Portuguese fishing boats that are used by small-time fishermen off the coast of Portugal that were that were sort of reborn in on some rivers in Oregon and discovered there and thought well these would be perfect for Grand Canyon and so they were very elaborate beautiful boats they're not perfect they look perfect but they certainly don't act perfect but anyway those trips take four people per boat and they go for two weeks and the trip is a really transformative for most clients I would say about two-thirds of them do not really know what to expect even though they read literature or maybe even books and are shocked many have never slept outside never slept in a 10 never camped it's just kind of a bucket list thing you have to go and they're usually blown away by how fantastic the trip is beyond their expectations even though you know for $5,000 you should have reasonably big expectations and I would say one of the things that that's most impressive to most people is you can't help and even for us guides who have been there many times you can't you can't help gaining or regaining a perspective about how brief our lives are relative to the age of say the canyon and that if you're going to do anything with your life you better get going and to now because yeah compared to the geological display there it took so long so many years to create our lives are like you know the blink of an eye geologically speaking so it's your earring gear that's one of the common revelations of people in the canyon the other part is that it's really possible to be happy without a phone without computer without a refrigerator and on and on and on and on it's I guess the other lesson is about how you know the the idea that it's it's also driven home how fragile life is how short life is because so many people have died there it's as a percentage of the visitors it's very small but you you remind us early in this book that look people come here and do really stupid things and die and you're not you are not focusing on the McCobb aspects of this just for their own sake but also as a warning to people look if you're gonna come here be prepared right well absolutely I think it's really easy to underestimate that which we don't know and even more so if someone we do know has done you know a hike a trip just even a visit to the rim and gotten an amazing photograph posing on the rim and you know someone tells you well it there's nothing to it you'll love it then and if you have that mindset there's nothing to it that can be there can be a brutal and very short wake up moment but and and people make mistakes you know we all make mistakes it's just in Grand Canyon frequently a really minor mistake or chain of minor mistakes has major major consequences well you mentioned as well early in the book I think in the foreword about the 9-1-1 mentality the idea that people are going there it's a national park they equate it with like Disneyland well if I get in trouble somebody will come and get me right well in fact we just my wife and I are in search and rescue been for many years now and there was just one of the most recent missions right here in this area were a couple hikers who hiked too far and if the panic button and actually got phone reception called a Sheriff's Department this year the kokino County Sheriff's Department also has jurisdiction within Grand Canyon because most of the canyon is in our county as well as most of it being in the park as well but but anyway that the attitude that was displayed is becoming much more common which is as soon as the rescuers got to them on foot they demanded the helicopters radio walk back out they were tired and it cracks me up the cracks everybody up because it's like where do you think the helicopters are gonna come from you know what do we have one parked in the back of the parking lot just waiting for somebody to get tired and that is a kind of a new development based on the ease of communication and one of the mistakes that's really common these days in the canyon and near it and in its general area here and probably around the wilderness areas around Las Vegas is the only piece of equipment you need to take with you is your cell phone and everything everything will flow from a phone call and unfortunately that's the way things are going now well the cell phone plays into it in another way and the tendency for people to do stupid things to take selfies and I think probably selfies weren't as prominent when you started writing the first edition of this book but I'm certain that they're they're causing problems now yeah it's even more the it's a cliche I guess you know take one more step backwards and actually had a man on a trip who did that to his wife in it accidentally not on purpose because we all thought oh you murdered your wife but he said what take one more step he was a very dominant german guy and and his dutiful wife did everything he said she took a step back one off the cliff and so that that cliche all that for a photograph either posing or taking a photograph people have literally gone off the edge of South Rim with a camera to their eye stepping around on the rim trying to get the exact perfect perspective in the viewfinder and post the gun and of course it even happens more often with people posing you know being asked to pose or posing on their own or begging to have their picture taken and they're looking for the most dramatic spot and it's just a little too dramatic and they're gone so yeah that happens it doesn't happen quite it happens probably a dozen times but as it has not happened hundreds of times which is what a lot of people might expect that you know people are dropping like flies it's actually not as awful in terms of sheer magnitude as as one would expect but it still does happen and even that it happened once it's kind of mind-boggling but it does happen you the first chapter in the book is about people who fall off the rim and and you mentioned that it's one of the first things visitors ask of a ranger or a guide hey how often does it happen and and you have to answer that yeah it is a crack-up because what once anyone looks off the rim and then they look around at the other people and they look there's no guardrail and they look around at everybody again and see what they're doing and look off the edge and go oh my god you know it's thousands of feet down the first question that pops into most people's head is you know there's got to be some kind of fatality rate here you know because look at I mean you won't survive if you make a wrong step you're not going to survive so that is the question how many people died here and that's I think that's the title of the chapter but oddly enough there are years certain years have gone by when nobody's got off the rim accidentally and there are other years and you don't know why this is case when there's been six seven eight independent nothing to do with one another but they've gone off in a rash of stupid mistakes and these are not suicides these are all accidental so it's very hard to predict why this happens or what will happen next year you know it might be seven next year it might be zero next year it's hard to understand you if the book starts off or that chapter starts off with the story about this and asks say how many people fall here and it's a warning get her off that wall before she falls off it's a Hollywood actress I guess who's on the wall yeah didi I was a DD she was she invented to the fashion designer for Hollywood and designed a pair of pants with the leg short and called them pedal pushers and this was the big dip you the opening moment for pedal pushers and he was standing on the wall that's exactly as you said get her up that to Ranger showed up and the senior one said to the junior one get her off that wall before she falls and and the junior one didn't even get two steps and she's already fallen and it's a really nice opening to the book because Tom and I when we were writing and I of the opinion there have been so many fatalities here and some of them are so interesting that it's going to take it's going to make a really heavy-duty book can we afford the time in the book to listen near misses and it turned out that D Johnson who fell off the wall and her pedal pushers actually survived she went halfway down the slope and was rocks the Ranger actually wrote a report here and said that you know gravel was falling out of her crotch into the void you know spinning into the air for several seconds board hit and he managed to get to her before she slid all the way off the edge and she ropes back up and then the deluded part of things where she's wrote back up and her halter top was now missing and she was really mad about it but she was alive and it and that was kind of a nice way to start the book that it's not all going to be dismal but frequently rescues are impossible because things happen too fast and it's thin air well it's a long way down I think you wrote in the book that it's comparable to surviving being struck by lightning twice if you fall off the edge chances are pretty good you're gonna die yeah it's been there have been very few there's been a few but only a very few that have fallen in exactly the right place get a slope and and rattle around and then bang into it hurry and get all bruised and beat up and broken in a few places but still alive and those are lucky it's it's even even been a couple of deliberate you know suicide attempts that have ended we'll get into those in a moment we're talking with Michael Gilley area about his book over the edge death in the Grand Canyon we're talking with Michael Gilley area about his book over the edge death in the Grand Canyon some just crazy stories about things that people have done including a guy who wanted to pretend to his daughter that he was falling he came there with a family and a college buddy basketball player will tell you how that one came out in just a moment here on coast to coast am we're back with Michael Guillory Michael you mentioned somewhere in the book I'm trying to remember where but people will show up visitors to the Grand Canyon and they'll remark gosh why aren't there guardrails all around this canyon as if that's achievable or desirable yeah it makes sense from if you've never been there you've never seen it and and it's highly theoretical question like well there's a big drop people go and look at it maybe there should be a guardrail and unfortunately either a bunch of reasons why a guardrail would be an interesting challenge one of them is that there are probably six governmental jurisdictions that would have to get together to build a guardrail and it'll have to agree the other is that it's about sixteen hundred miles of a rim almost 1,700 miles of parameter that would require guardrail that would be you know more than halfway across the United States length of guardrail and the and the next one is that most people fall not because there is no guardrail but because they've gone through the guardrail to the other side so they can be on the very edge so even a guardrail would not stop people it would be kind of a symbolic thing if it existed so there's all these reasons why guardrails not possible everywhere and I think the original concept behind you don't need guardrails is people are too smart to fall off and that that was the original ruling concept and it's been proven that that's not perfectly true but guardrails are virtually impossible well you don't really want to have guardrails there I mean it changes the experience doesn't it the aesthetics there are a few places where there's a perfect view of the canyon and the rim itself juts out and kind of a little peninsula like a natural version of the Skywalk and those get so much action that the park has placed guardrails in a few of those places because simply because they get crowded because the view is so good from that little spot and the little spot is little and there can be a lot of people there all at once guardrails a really good idea to just keep the jostling down but as I said before one of the amazing parts of all this is when it comes to fatal accidents as people people have frequently stepped through or climbed over a guardrail in order to I don't know why because it's the only three more feet usually but they have to have that three more feet behind them instead of in front of them and that's how a lot of these Falls happened a lot of Falls happen with people doing that and then sitting on the rim you know with their feet dangling hundreds of feet above anything else down there and then get up a looser balance because you know when you're when you're visually oriented to most of you're walking in a movement and you suddenly get up and there's nothing closed I mean there's nothing but empty air of the huge void down there a lot of people don't orient themselves in such a way to stay erect and poof they're gone but anyway guardrails would not stop any of that well we can't afford to keep the park open so we're not gonna be funding in a cart rales I don't think anything them soon there's a story you tell early in the book and the in the first chapter about people falling in mentioned sort of an example of what not to do and and mixing alcohol with the rim of the canyon is not a good idea the guys name is greg gingrich 1992 you remember that story yeah he was there was open all but i don't think it was like a record-setting amount but what he was doing is goofing off and this is one of the we tom and i my co-author on this book and tom i have to introduce him a little bit he's not here right now but he was the rim clinic in you know south rim grand canyon clinic doctor for about nine years before we started working on this book and during the research and he'd seen a bunch of different kinds of accidents and the results from those and so that's how I convinced him it was a good idea to write this book but in one of the things we haven't figured out is why some people so clearly understand the danger that various different dangers including the fall off the rim danger while others seem to think that it's it's not really dangerous it's you know I don't know what they think that's what we haven't figured out but in this particular case the guy was walking with his daughter and she was like a young teenager in age and they were with friends as in your intro a few minutes ago you said and they were walking back to get together at the parking lot they were walking parallel along the trail with the rock wall and those rock walls are only two to three men some of them are barely two feet high so he was trying to goof off with his daughter and he jumped on the wall and she was she was in this Oh dad mood like you're like you're always goofing off and just jumping on the wall didn't impress her or not so he waved his arms in a big windmill and went oh I'm falling and and immediately on the on the down side of the wall the canyon side of the wall there was a slope it wasn't a perfect drop-off so he pretended like his falling off the slope and she just didn't she thought he was so goofy that he she didn't want to encourage him to do anything more so she didn't pay any attention to him he kept going and silver minutes later she met everybody in the parking lot and he hadn't shown up and then he hadn't shown up later and then later yet so they hit the panic button Toller Rangers helicopter flew over and he was 400 feet below he had slipped apparently as soon as he hit the slope pretending that he was falling his pretense turned into the real deal and that story is not unfortunately it's not unique there but other people have goofed off in similar ways and booths are gone and it's one of the things I cannot explain I had to wrack my brains and you what is the mindset that you're dropping 500 feet of thin air before the next little rock is is not dangerous I mean I can't fathom it you tell a story about a guy I guess he's a transient named James Merriman who wanted to gather up coins people toss Goodluck coins over onto a Ledge or something and this guy yeah I guess it tell us yeah he was a funny he was a funny guy I actually knew some of the people who knew him some of these many of the episodes of this book we only have the information from various official sources or newspaper or whatever and other episodes we know most of the people involved and there's a different character when you're writing about something you know about more but anyway this guy was a strange strange animal because he kind of was a not quite homeless but he lived in a homeless kind of way he would ride his bicycle Flagstaff to Grand Canyon and hang out he had a cave that he lived in there and he would stay for weeks at a time he'd gather up all the coins that he could get from these and and that's another thing I don't know why people throw coins into the canyon but he knew right where they did it and he would he would hang out gathering coins and then sometimes when he was gathering coins he woke um an egg Iman and throw coins almost like feeding breadcrumbs for the Ducks but when normally this worked out for him and he'd have this big heavy sack of coins at the end of a few weeks and he'd go back to Flagstaff and take everybody he knew out to dinner then he'd Drive back a ride his bike again 80 miles back to the canyon and and do it all over again and this figured a case people were urging him or at least marveling at him as he was gathering coins at a precarious area and he just uttered those fateful last words hey watch this and he took a jump to get to another ledge and missed it oh well that's a long way down to think about your mistake yeah and that unfortunately if you've taken physics back in high school and you realize it's 32 feet for the first 16 feet so first second 32 for the next and so on you can start figuring out gee you have time to almost start the preamble to the Constitution before you're hit and it's certainly plenty of time to think well that was stupid you know it occurs to me that it be well you've got a whole chapter on murders but it occurs to me that it would be hard to tell the difference the husband's goofing off on the on the Angier and the white item and gives them a little shot that issue has come up and and probably for very good reasons the there have been a couple of dubious unwitnessed quote unquote unwitnessed Falls where somebody stood you know the surviving spouse did to make a little money out of the event but no one was there to contradict the story or no was there to even have seen anything so it's not exactly it has been said that inside the canyon is the is the scene for the perfect crime the rim itself it may not be as much seen at the perfect crime because there are people around of course again there's hundreds of mile or rim so there may be sections but no people around but anyway that has happened it there's some dubious events that were had to be labeled accidental because there were no concrete evidence it just was fishing you know I should mention I was talking about the wife pushing the husband off it's it's more likely the men who are gonna die because of stupid things that men do right i when we added up every conceivable accident Canyon it's seventy five percent men and ironic women who died died because men did stupid things while they were while a woman was with the man you know so women are just naturally more cautious so there's the whole issue of deaths that happen above the rim or on the rim and then you get below the rim it's an entirely different experience an entirely different set of rules and circumstances right yeah absolutely correct I mean it's a it's another world I can hear you hello you there Michael well we're we're waiting to regain our connection to Michael gallery he's Gilley arey his book is called over the edge death in the Grand Canyon gripping accounts of well-known fatal mishaps and the most famous of the world's seven natural wonders and of course when I first started picking up this book and and reading it I'm wondering about the Thelma and Louise question how many people have sited after seeing that movie to go ahead and rev up the Thunderbird and drive over the rim or through a guardrail or commit suicide in that in that way and it turns out that the people are very definitely influenced by movies because when that movie came out when that movie came out a couple of people were inspired by it to go ahead and go over the edge and we'll get to that part suicides in a moment but Michael I think before the break you were we were talking about the preponderance of dumb things done by men over women yeah well unfortunately that's an easy topic because you're almost nothing you can think of that causes major problems in the world work weren't instigated by men instead of women and that category of accidents were then Grand Canyon falls into that same arena of hey hey Bobo watch this but we're saying also that one below the rim yeah once you are below the rim it is a different world and and it and actually all these crazy falls off the rim are are the least interesting types of mishaps that occur in the canyon is when you drop off up the rim on a on a trail or a route and there are many many many trails and routes yeah routes are usually much more hair-raising but most of the accidents happen on trails as opposed to routes but there's a whole different constellation of events and and dangers or or things to watch out for including you know including again falling because there's no superhighway into the canyon it's all on foot and it's all exposed and but as the park rangers originally figured out most people are so smart they stay away from the edge so most of the inner Canyon Falls don't happen on the trails they happen when people go off the trail yeah really odd I'm going to take my picture here I'm odd circumstances where the mentality apparently is similar to the rim problems that were in a part and therefore parks are nice and you don't get hurt in parks but but the other other things that kick in that are dangerous are you know environmental it just gets so hot in the canyon if it's a hundred and twelve degrees in Phoenix it's also a hundred and twelve degrees the bottom of Grand Canyon I think the bottom of the Grand Canyon is is hotter than Las Vegas generally speaking and my son who's also a guide just did a trip two years ago or got 122 during the trip and he said they couldn't do anything except stand in the water and that was that was their whole activity for the entire trip was standing in the waters anyway there's a whole bevy of dangers you know going off trail getting lost under estimating heat under estimating how much water under estimating how far things are and on and on they all lead to different sorts of combinations and then the classic was people have braved all that and done quite well and it's hotter than hell and they get to the bottom and jump in the river and the river carry I'm where they're gone forever so that whole whole spectrum of different ways to make a mistake starts yawning widely once you're off the rim and a lot of stories in the book about people who are in great shape they're athletes they can handle it they're gonna run up the trail and run down the trail and show off and show everybody how tough they are and they they really make terrible errors in judgment yeah there's a unfortunate classic example which is now on name was Margaret Bradley and this happened just a few years back but she was an avid runner ranked competitively she was also a medical school student very bright and she was so dedicated to running she ran marathons she ran short races and so on she would run one race in New York get on an airplane run another one in Chicago or the next day that kind of thing but she had a buddy or not not that she knew very well in Flagstaff but she came out to Flagstaff and he suggested they do a run in Grand Canyon and this was the classic story where he thought it was without even looking at a map without going on the internet without doing anything he picked a a a rarely used route during the middle of summer that he thought was about 15 miles was actually about 29 and they went for a for a late morning run 29 miles in the canyon in the summer and he it's a long complicated story but she only brought two liters of water she probably would have needed eight I would say eight minimum you know couple gallons minimum and because she did not understand where she was going she was just counting on him and he had brought four and he he crashed and he didn't die crash and she went to run for help and she eventually died of dehydration trying to get help for him he waited till dark and he made his way out with somebody else rescued him when he hit the main trail so that sort of thing is not unusual or several people who died doing the exact same route exact same time of year we're gonna pick up the story on the other side a lot of murders suicides mysteries in the Grand Canyon of course if you want to go there route 66 is one way you can go that goes into Grand Canyon country what's left of it thank you for listening to coast to coast I'm on our official YouTube channel I'm your host George Noory and don't forget to visit the coast insider membership area on coast to coast am calm where you can access our past upcoming and classic shows

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Published: Mon Feb 04 2019