Grand Canyon Safety Debated as Deaths Rise

The last time Robert Spangler saw his wife alive, he was setting up his camera and she was posing for one last snapshot at Grand Canyon National Park.

Donna Spangler, 59, fell more than 100 feet to her death, becoming the first of seven people killed last year in accidental falls into the canyon. Two died in November.

Park officials said they can’t remember a worse year.

It was a sunny Easter Sunday morning at the Grand Canyon, and Robert and Donna Spangler were climbing out after camping overnight on Horseshoe Mesa.

“She was not a very strong hiker,” Spangler, 60, said from his home in Durango, Colo. “I don’t know if she became unbalanced with her backpack or if she shuffled her feet or stepped on a rock that became loose. I turned around and she was gone.”

From 1989 to 1992, seven people died in accidental falls at the park. Statistics before then are incomplete.

Park managers call the spate of deaths a coincidence. They have no plans to add railings or increase the already numerous warnings in signs and brochures that caution against peering over the edge of the mile-deep chasm, said park spokeswoman Maureen Oltrogge.

The warnings often are depicted in the international symbol of a stick figure falling backward.

Besides the falls last year, three people committed suicide in the canyon.

Park workers, environmentalists and regular visitors like Spangler say there’s no way to make the 277-mile-long park fall-proof.

“The people that visit simply forget how spectacularly dangerous it can be,” said Spangler, a canyon hiker for 14 years.

Tom Jensen, executive director of Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group, said the park’s more than 4 million annual visitors need to use common sense to avoid accidents.

“A lot of tourists approach the Grand Canyon like a ride at Disneyland or some other amusement park and think it’s idiot-proof,” Jensen said. “The Grand Canyon wasn’t built by attorneys and engineers.”

For the more intrepid, a road runs parallel to part of the popular South Rim near the Grand Canyon Village visitor center. And a nine-mile trail follows the edge a few steps from cliffs that plunge thousands of feet to the Colorado River.