Death in Zion National Park

by Randi Minetor

  Park officials were quick to use this tragedy to reinforce the message that those planning to hike the Narrows need to check with park rangers at a visitor center or ranger station before venturing up or down the Virgin River. “We cannot stress too strongly that visitors need to heed these flash flood warnings and plan alternate trips that don’t include slot canyons,” acting park superintendent Eddie Lopez told the Salt Lake Tribune. He urged hikers to get updated weather information before venturing into any narrow or slot canyon, and to delay their hike if thunderstorms are predicted.

  To Hike or Not to Hike

  Park rangers at Zion move quickly to put a range of warnings in place when flash floods are possible in the Narrows. Hikers who apply for permits at ranger stations receive sincere and concerned discouragement from rangers if rainstorms are in the forecast, and signs are posted at the Narrows trailheads, warning hikers that flooding may be imminent. “Unfortunately, many people ignore the warnings and enter the Narrows,” spokesperson Davies told the Deseret News on the day Algan’s body was retrieved. When asked if the victim should have known a flash flood warning was in effect, Davies responded simply: “Yes.”

  Why would anyone hike the Narrows when there’s a flash flood in the forecast? For vacationers who have planned a hike up or down the Narrows as a central part of their Zion visit, timing can become a greater priority than the potential for danger. The special challenges of hiking, climbing, or canyoneering in the Narrows make it a bucket-list experience for many visitors—and after months or even years of planning, scrapping the hike because of rain may feel like the coward’s way out.

  The potential for life-threatening danger is very real, however. To date, fifteen people have perished in the Narrows when they were caught in flash floods, and many others have sustained injuries in their scramble to get out of the path of rushing water. There is no way to tally how many hikers have been forced to wait for hours or even overnight after they’ve succeeded in reaching higher ground—and untold numbers of these hikers made plans only for a day hike or for a single night in camp, finding themselves without sufficient food, water, warm clothing, or dry items to make their unscheduled extra time in the Narrows as bearable as possible.

  With the wealth of information outlets available today, it’s easy for would-be Narrows hikers to get the weather updates they need to determine if they should postpone their excursion for a day or two to avoid flash flood activity. The Zion National Park website’s Current Conditions page, at www.nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/conditions.htm, provides a number of links to water level information and flash flood forecasts, including the National Weather Service Forecast Office’s page on all of southern Utah’s parks: www.wrh.noaa.gov/slc/flashflood. There’s even a link to the US Geological Survey’s flow rate data for the Virgin River, so serious water information enthusiasts can delve into the trends in cubic feet per second. For people who just want to check the forecast, links to the National Weather Service (weather.gov) provide radar maps and the percentage chance of rain.

  Descriptions of the Narrows hikes found on the park’s website (www.nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/thenarrows.htm) make it clear that this is not a hike for the timid. “Hiking the Zion Narrows means hiking in the Virgin River,” the website explains. “At least 60% of the hike is spent wading, walking, and sometimes swimming in the stream. There is no maintained trail; the route is the river. The current is swift, the water is cold, and the rocks underfoot are slippery. Flash flooding and hypothermia are constant dangers. Good planning, proper equipment, and sound judgment are essential for a safe and successful trip.”

  There is no way to judge how many people’s lives have been saved by the availability of data, the emphatic warning signs, and the advice of rangers in the park; we rarely hear about people who are dissuaded from making a dangerous hike into the wilderness. We do know, however, that while people find themselves trapped by a flash flood in the Narrows every year, only a handful of these floods have led to hikers’ deaths. The most significant of these include the flash flood of 1961, one other deadly incident in 2015 in Keyhole Canyon, and a highly controversial flood in Kolob Canyon that took the lives of two adults and endangered a third adult and five children.

  The Flash Flood of 1961

  “If Linda hadn’t heard the roar,” John Dearden of Park City, Utah, told the Provo Daily Herald, “nobody would have been alive.”

  Some describe the summer storms in southwest Utah as monsoons, sudden bursts of hard, pelting rain that flood dry creek beds until roads and bridges disappear under the flow. On Sunday, September 17, 1961, a cloudburst followed by steady rain dumped a whopping 0.79 inches of rain on parts of Utah, saturating the ground in advance of the more powerful storm to come. Monday’s rain inundated Zion National Park and the surrounding area with an additional 1.33 inches, washing out the main bridge at the park’s south entrance near Springdale and closing Highway 15 from St. George. Water engorged the Virgin River as the rain sluiced over the sandy soil and spilled down the riverbanks. As the rain continued to fall, the river swelled and gathered speed—and the force of it rushed into the Narrows.

  Inside the canyon on Sunday morning, twenty-six hikers on a tour conducted by SOCOTWA Expeditions were well along an eighteen-mile hike they had begun on Saturday morning. Expecting clear weather—as reported by the local weather service when group leaders checked on Saturday morning—they had arrived by bus from Salt Lake City and entered the canyon from the Navajo Lake area in Dixie National Forest, heading south along the North Fork of the river. Nineteen teens and seven adults made their way along the spectacular slot canyons, keeping an unhurried pace between the two-thousand-foot-high canyon walls. They camped in the Narrows on Saturday night and continued on Sunday morning, entering an area well known for having no alternate routes and few opportunities to reach high ground.

  They reached the confluence of Kolob Creek with the Virgin River at about noon on Sunday, and leader Robert Perry, an Air National Guardsman, led nine of the hikers on a side trip into Orderville Canyon. That’s when Linda McIntyre let out a yell, and Perry heard the flood coming toward them. “The first indication of trouble was a thunderlike noise he heard in back of the group,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported. When he turned around, Perry saw “a wall of muddy water, bristling with driftwood, tree trunks and limbs.”

  Perry decided that they should turn back. “We got to the mouth of the canyon and found Carla Larson standing knee deep in water,” he told the Tribune. The girl was stranded on a high spot in the river, with deep water all around her. “We had to swim about ten yards to get to her. Someone asked, ‘what next.’” Several group members provided their backpacks as flotation devices, and they towed Carla to higher ground and comparative safety.

  “We knew a terrific flood had come down through the canyon,” said Perry, “but we didn’t realize how bad it was.” Inexplicably, the weather was still clear. Half an hour would pass before the rain arrived in the Narrows—and then “you couldn’t see a hundred yards across the gulch,” he said. “I’ve been in hurricanes before, but they couldn’t hold a candle to this storm.”

  Perry led his party up Orderville Canyon and found high ground, where they made a shelter from their ponchos and “huddled together in wet sleeping bags for warmth.”

  They passed a terrifying night in Orderville Canyon, with no idea how the other sixteen people in their tour were faring in the storm and flood.

  “The rain-swollen stream suddenly grew to a 14-foot crest,” the Daily Herald reported, “and bore down on them in a canyon only 12 feet wide in places.”

  Luckily, the group had reached an area of the Narrows where the walls provided some hand- and footholds, as well as ledges where they could escape the massive torrent of river water. Perched on sandbars and shelves of rock with the river rushing just below them, the members of the party could not see who had found their way up the canyon walls and who may have
been swept away by the raging water. They remained pinned down throughout the night, hopeful that all of their friends and guides had scrambled to safety.

  “The water came up to within a foot of us—we couldn’t have gone any further, the rock wall was straight up,” said Dearden.

  Hiker Lyle Moss told the Salt Lake Tribune that he and two other hikers managed to climb up on top of a sandbar, but the water came to within six inches of where they were standing.

  “Long time residents of the area say it was the heaviest rainstorm to hit the Zion Park area in nearly 25 years,” the Tribune reported. “Rain gauges at park headquarters caught one and 43 hundredths inches of precipitation during the storm.”

  Twenty-two hours passed before the water had finally receded enough for the hikers to make their way out. On the ground at last, they found the riverbed muddier than when they began and loaded with debris—fallen branches, twigs, and dirt that formed irregular dams and obstacles to their progress. The ten who had passed the night in Orderville Canyon met up with nine other members of the party about a mile and a half downstream, and they began to hear the fate of some of the others. One group of boys and girls had found safety on the opposite side of the canyon from Lyle Moss, and they watched in horror as forty-eight-year-old Walter Scott, the leader of the group, and two younger boys drifted by in a current moving at an estimated twenty-five miles per hour.

  When nineteen of the original twenty-six hikers emerged from the Narrows at the Riverside Walk on Monday afternoon, they found that search and rescue crews were already looking for them. Tour bus driver Dave Randall had arrived at the Temple of Sinawava on Sunday afternoon to pick up the hikers and take them home to Salt Lake—and when the tour group did not arrive, Randall moved quickly to notify park officials.

  The hikers also learned that two of their comrades had already been pulled from the river. Young Vance Justett, a thirteen-year-old Springdale resident, discovered Walter Scott’s body in Springdale on Monday when the boy went to the river to see how much damage the flood had done. He told Washington County deputy sheriff Dick Barnes that he saw a pair of legs in a pile of driftwood that the water had swept onto the shore. “So swift was the torrent that Mr. Scott’s clothes were ripped off and only a pair of white tennis shoes remained on the body,” the Tribune reported. “The victim’s body was swept almost ten miles from where the party was struck by the torrent, near the junction of Kolob Creek and the Virgin River.” Perry told the Salt Lake Tribune that Scott had brought up the rear of the expedition to remain with some of the boys in the party who had trouble organizing their equipment after their night of camping.

  Not far from the spot where Scott was found, the body of thirteen-year-old Steve Florence, a junior high school student from Park City, was discovered lodged in a pile of driftwood, about 4:00 p.m. on Monday. The remains of seventeen-year-old Ray Nichols came to light at about 2:00 p.m. Monday, lodged between two trees near the park’s South Campground. Nichols was a student at East High School in Salt Lake City.

  When the exhausted hikers arrived on Monday with four of their comrades still not in evidence, a search began for Alvin Nelson, Frank Johnson, Kenneth Webb, and Doug Childs. Waiting families and searchers were overjoyed when fifty-year-old Webb and Childs, a boy of thirteen, sloshed their way out of the Virgin River and turned up at the park headquarters at about 5:00 p.m., both alive and well. They had climbed onto an embankment to take a picture when they saw the flood coming at them, but they could not communicate with the people ahead of them. They stayed on the high ground as the flood overtook their position, watching the water come up all the way to their knees before it began to subside. Webb decided to wait until they were sure the entire storm was over before making their way out of the canyon.

  The ordeal was not quite over for Doug Childs, however. It fell to him to identify the body of his friend Steve Florence. “The Childs youth looked at the human wreckage of what was once his friend, [and] whispered almost inaudibly, ‘that’s Steve,’” the Tribune said.

  The twenty-one survivors of the flash flood of 1961 were Albert Anderson, John Bangerter, Doug Childs, Bonnie Darger, John and Allen Dearden, Lila Fieden, Katherine Grim, Carol Harmon, Thomas Katwok, Carla Larson, Linda and Margaret McIntyre, Thad Merriman, Lyle Moss, Robert Perry, Adene Scott, Thomas Spencer, Leif Spondeck, Tommy Terry, and Kenneth Webb.

  By Monday night there was still no sign of Nelson or Johnson. The park service sent a search party into the Narrows on Tuesday morning in hopes of finding the two young men alive, while jeep posses from Washington and Iron Counties searched along the Virgin River from the southern park boundary all the way to St. George.

  The searchers soon discovered that the volume of water that had passed through the canyon brought with it massive quantities of silt, sand, rock, and other debris, a load as dangerous as the water itself. As the search wore on through the day Tuesday and broadened to include forty miles along the length of the Virgin River, the rescue teams surmised that the two missing seventeen-year-old Salt Lake City boys were buried under layers of newly arrived gravel and sand. The parents of the boys waited in the park as ground and air crews scoured the area for any clue that could lead searchers to the bodies. Cleanup crews, usually assigned to clearing driftwood and moving sand to restore the river’s normal flow, had the grisly task of continuing the search as well.

  Equally challenging, the river had not yet returned to its normally shallow level, making it difficult and even dangerous for the search to continue in some parts of the canyon. Sheriff Ray Renouf of Washington County finally called off the search Tuesday evening, promising the families of the two missing boys that the effort would continue at an intensive level once the waters had receded enough to allow crews to see the bottom of the river.

  With less water and more debris visible over the next several days, searchers continued to try to locate the missing boys. “Searchers scoured a mile and a half stretch of the Virgin River from the southern edge of Zion Park through Springdale Thursday, but found no trace of the missing youths,” the Daily Herald reported. The hunt beyond the Narrows continued on the theory that the boys’ bodies may have been carried out of the park on the river’s storm surge. The Washington County sheriff’s department spent Friday, September 22, searching eight miles of the river with six hunting dogs, and park service searchers covered another eight miles within the park, scouring the riverbed and moving driftwood and rocks to attempt to uncover any trace of the bodies. Not so much as a scrap of clothing emerged.

  On Sunday, September 24, two hundred volunteer searchers covered the length of the river, hoping to bring the final chapter of the Narrows tragedy to a close. Indeed, this became the last day of the search, but no sign of Johnson or Nelson came to light. Sheriff Renouf told the media that he believed the bodies were buried under debris left behind by the storm and flood, and that they were still somewhere at the bottom of the canyon. His statement brought the organized search to an inconclusive but necessary close.

  Forty-five years later, in 2006, a man swimming in the Virgin River discovered a bone fragment, the top half of a human skull. He brought it to the Springdale Police, and Chief Kurt Wright thought immediately of the two boys lost in 1961. “That’s the only thing that’s never really been solved here,” he told the Associated Press. “We’ve had numerous drownings since then in the Narrows, but we’ve always recovered the victims.”

  He brought it to the local medical examiner, but they decided not to “reopen old wounds” by contacting the families or testing the fragment, Wright said. At that point DNA testing would have been prohibitively expensive. The bone fragment was stored in a box in the evidence room until another investigator brought it up in 2012, when he learned that the University of North Texas offered free DNA testing to law enforcement—a boon that could clear up at least a portion of a mystery half a century old.

  Wright found relatives of the two missing boys in
Oregon and Alaska and acquired personal effects that might provide DNA samples. When the results came back from the lab, the skull fragment matched the DNA of Alvin Nelson. The boy’s remains were returned to his sister, Doralee Freebairn, for burial in Salt Lake City.

  “You’d think after all these years it would be put to rest, but all the stress and frustration just comes right back,” said Freebairn. Still, she added, “I find this all very spiritual.”

  Two Men, Too Cold, Too Fast

  On Wednesday or Thursday, April 21 or 22, 2010, Jesse Scaffidi and Daniel Chidester, two twenty-three-year-old men from Las Vegas, Nevada, began a trip into the Narrows that would test their skills as hikers, wilderness builders, and navigators of rushing water. They told their families that they planned to hike into the top of the Narrows from the Navajo Lake area, ford the Virgin River at its confluence with Deep Creek, and then build a log raft from materials they expected to find in the vicinity. With the raft constructed, they intended to float down the river a distance of fifty miles to Hurricane, Utah, where their journey would come to its triumphant end. They expected to arrive in Hurricane on Saturday, April 24.

  It seemed like a great adventure, but none of it was sanctioned by the National Park Service, according to comments park spokesperson Ron Terry made to an Associated Press reporter a few days later. “The Park Service would not have issued a hiking permit in The Narrows because of the danger of high water, nor would officials have approved the plan to build a log raft,” the report tells us.

  Terry noted that the two men did not attempt to obtain permits or notify any rangers about their plans. Family members told the AP that despite the fact that water in the Narrows is usually very cold in April, the hiker-rafters did not bring cold-water gear or life vests for their journey down the river. “If they had [tried to get permits, they] would not have received a permit due to inappropriate planning and lack of personal safety equipment,” a news release from the park informed the media. “At the time, the North Fork of the Virgin River was running about 250 cubic feet per second and the water temperature was around 40 degrees Fahrenheit.”