A second cable draw works, built in 1901, added “a large platform for the cable operator [and] a smaller, manually operated pulley that was used to haul lumber to the platform, where it could be loaded in baskets and sent down the canyon.” The cable works became a great success—so much so that by December 1906, Flanigan had conveyed two hundred thousand feet of sawn lumber from the top of what became known as Cable Mountain to the canyon floor. (Media coverage at the time consistently calls this distance three thousand feet; the park says this distance is actually two thousand feet.)
The system had one fairly dangerous flaw, however: It attracted lightning. As the highest thing on an already high point, it invited bolts to hit it in stormy weather—and storms often arrived with little or no warning in the days before Doppler radar and sophisticated forecasting.
On July 28, 1908, a group of young people from Springdale visited the cable works to see the mighty machines in action. Among them were Clarinda Langston, Thornton Hepworth Jr., and Lionel Stout, all of whom were about nine years old. Young Stout was the son of one of the lumbermen who worked at the top of the mountain, and Lionel was up there that day as well, working alongside his father.
As the three children stood and watched the lumber platform make its way down the canyon on strong metal wires, a bolt of lightning snaked out and hit the cable works. The two boys fell to the ground, and Clarinda found herself blinded by the electrical charge. “I did not know what was happening and I went blind and couldn’t see,” she was quoted later.
Someone spread a quilt under a tree and led Clarinda to it, urging her to sit or lie down and wait there in safety. When people rushed to help Lionel and Thornton, they found both young boys had been killed by the blast.
“Their bodies were taken down the mountain using the cable works,” Taylor wrote—an act acknowledging just how rustic the Zion area was, with no road to bring the boys down to their families.
The tragedy did not stop progress. The cable works continued to operate until 1927, transporting lumber down from the sawmill at the top of the mountain.
Fire on Cable Mountain
Clarence Lemmon and Ether Winder were working at the top of Cable Mountain on Sunday, December 18, 1921, to bring back a load of lumber, an arduous task even with use of the cable system. The two young men—Winder was just shy of twenty-one years old—worked through the night to mill and load their lumber, and continued working through the day on Sunday in a soaking rain and, eventually, a wet snow that chilled them through to the bone. Winder had camped in a sheep wagon until that Sunday evening, when Lemmon invited him into his brother David’s house—“a good substantial dwelling house that I lived in during the summer while operating the mill and was well furnished and contained a good store of supplies,” David Lemmon wrote to the Washington County News on January 10, 1922, in a letter also signed by Enos E. Winder, Eliel Winder, and John A. Allred.
Knowing that he needed to dry his clothes and eager to sleep in a warm place instead of in a wagon surrounded by ten inches of new-fallen snow, Winder gratefully accepted the invitation. He carried his bedding out of the wagon and made himself a place on the floor of the main room of the house. Clarence Lemmon made them some supper (David was not there), and the young men built a strong fire, hung their clothes up to dry, and got some rest after their long, hard night and day.
Winder awoke with a start at about 10:30 p.m. to discover that the house was on fire. He yelled for Lemmon to wake up and run and bolted out of the shack himself. Lemmon woke up and realized that the fire had already burned through the partition between the two rooms and the flames had reached the foot of his bed. He got up and ran, rushing right over Winder’s bed on his way out of the cabin and noting with relief that Winder was not in the bed. For a few precious seconds, he believed that both of them had escaped unharmed.
Suddenly he heard groaning from inside the house. Lemmon ran back into the burning building and discovered Winder lying across Lemmon’s bed. Winder, not seeing his friend outside because of all the smoke billowing between them, had run back in to save Lemmon from the fire. Once inside, however, as he felt his way to the bedroom and pawed at the bed to find Lemmon, he was overcome by the smoke almost immediately and collapsed across the bed.
Clarence “caught Winder about the waist and pulled him off the bed,” David Lemmon’s letter continued, “however Winder being a large man, he was unable to lift him and by this time the fire had cut off all possible retreat by way of the door so he was obliged to make his retreat through the window.” With smoke and flames threatening to consume him, Clarence finally had no choice but to abandon Winder’s body and run for his life. Clarence told his brother that “he [knew] that Winder was dead when he pulled him from the bed.”
Clarence ran for his horse and rode two miles in wind and snow, clad only in his union suit, to the nearest phone to call the people of Springdale. He reached John Winder, Ether’s father, who told him to wait where he was for help to arrive and to keep warm until they could bring him some clothing.
John Winder rounded up a rescue party in minutes, bringing six people—his sons Elmer and Lyle; neighbors Hyrum Orin, Howard Ruesch, and Alvin Allred; and Clarence’s brother, David—up the trail in Zion Canyon to the top of the mountain. When they arrived at about 2:45 a.m., only smoldering timber remained of the house. “Ether’s body was found with the head resting under the springs of Clarence Lemmon’s bed. It was badly charred, the head, lower part of the arms and part of the legs being entirely consumed by the fire,” the Washington County News reported later that week.
Witnesses concluded that the fire “very likely was started from the stove pipe in the ceiling,” the County News said. The men who wrote the impassioned letter to the County News ended their account with an admonishment: “There seems to be a tendency on the part of some to cast reflections upon young Lemmon for this disaster. You can see from the above that no blame can be attached to anyone.”
A Final Cable Mountain Casualty
Even after it fell into disuse in 1927, the cable line had one more act of destruction left in its system.
On April 11, 1930, Orderville school principal Albin Brooksby took a group of students on an outing in Zion Canyon, including a picnic and outdoor activities in the shadow of the old cable system. Long since dormant by that time, the cable stood only as a historical marker and most of it had been disassembled, but one piece remained in place: the iron clevis, a U-shaped fastener that was the central part of a pinning device. The large piece of iron appeared to be secured at the top of the cable.
As the students and their principal enjoyed their picnic under the former cable system, the ten-pound iron clevis suddenly came free and slid down three thousand feet of cable, gaining “terrific speed” on its way down the nearly vertical drop. It crashed into the group at the base at literally terminal velocity.
“The clevice [sic] struck Brooksby first, hitting him on the head and body and nearly cutting him in half,” the Washington County News said the following week, “then went through the boys, breaking the arm and collar bone of Eugene Russell and cutting his face.” The device also lacerated the skull of another boy, Lee Stevens, and several other boys received less serious cuts and bruises. Henry Carroll, an Orderville resident, took the two gravely injured boys to the Iron County hospital, where Russell remained overnight. Stevens was able to return home that evening.
A prominent citizen in the small Utah community, Brooksby was a member of the bishopric of his ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and served as a Scout leader. He left behind a wife and four children.
“Today, all that survives of the Draw Works system is the upper terminal,” the park’s website tells us. “The towers on the canyon floor and the cable were removed within a few years of the end of operation.” The remaining structure was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and the park compl
eted a stabilization project in 2011 to preserve this landmark.
One CCC Injury Ends in Death
From 1933 through 1942, the Civilian Conservation Corps came to Zion to complete public works projects that taught young men skills to make them employable for the rest of their lives. CCC workers in Zion built trails, campgrounds, and parking areas; constructed buildings still in use today; assisted in firefighting; and reduced the flooding of the Virgin River.
Most of their work required strong bodies that could handle hard labor like removing trees, digging trenches, and hefting building supplies; some men also learned to use explosives like dynamite as they blasted out rock walls to create open areas. Remarkably, only one of these men lost his life in such a pursuit—and he wasn’t even handling the explosives.
Seventeen-year-old Ray Tanner walked into a blasting area near the Bridge Mountain CCC camp on December 28, 1937, just as the men there set off a charge. “His leg was nearly severed from his body by a large rock that flew more than three hundred feet to strike him as he was leaving a small building near the work project,” the Washington County News said.
A resident of Salem, Utah, Tanner had arrived at the camp just two weeks before the accident occurred. Medics at the camp gave him first aid, and camp surgeons I. F. Clark and Von H. Robertson rushed him off to Fort Douglas hospital. There he went directly into emergency amputation surgery and survived the ordeal, but “surgical shock” and a severe infection set in soon after. His body gave up the fight on February 8, 1938, six weeks after the accident.
“On the day that notice of their fellow enrollee’s death was received by the members of the camp, they did a memorial retreat formation in his honor,” the newspaper reported. The men of the CCC stood at attention and dipped the United States flag as one of their number played “Taps” on a horn. They also sent a floral wreath to Tanner’s parents, and five members of the corps attended his funeral in Salem.
“On January 31, the company made up a sum of $25.90 in donation to be mailed to enrollee Tanner,” the Washington County News continued. “This was mailed in a cashier’s check on the day of his death.” We can probably assume this uncommon generosity—given that these men were only paid $30 per month, and sent $25 of this home to their families—eventually found its way to Tanner’s family to help cover the cost of the funeral.
Death by Choice
There are those who take their work with them on vacation, whether they visit a national park, make their way to a tropical island, or spend their time off with relatives and friends. Conversely, there are those whose work finds them wherever they go. Such was the case when a vacationing Los Angeles police detective came upon the decomposing body of a young woman on July 1, 1947, in the Emerald Pools area of Zion National Park.
If the discerning eye of an experienced detective had not happened upon the woman, she might never have been found at all, lying as she was off the trail in some brush.
The woman turned out to be Evelyn Frances Callahan, an identification made when Sheriff A. B. Prince of Washington County sent her fingerprints to the FBI laboratory in Washington, DC. The twenty-three-year-old woman was employed by Pacific Telegraph and Telephone Company in Seattle, Washington. On December 16, 1946, she had transferred within the company to Portland, Oregon—and on June 5, 1947, she had abruptly resigned her position, and had not been heard from since.
Sheriff’s office investigators found two items near the body that helped them begin to piece together the young woman’s story. First, they discovered shreds of a Zion Park tour ticket in the name of Mary McCafferty. The second item was a .32-caliber pistol. The county coroner quickly determined that Callahan had died of a gunshot wound to the head, a fact corroborated by the FBI’s investigation of the scene. The federal bureau decided, however, that the position of the gun and the direction from which the bullet entered the body ruled out suicide. “A coroner’s jury reached a verdict that the woman met her death by foul play,” the Deseret News reported ten days later.
As to a slayer, however, there seemed to be no clues at all. Who was Mary McCafferty, and if she played a role in Callahan’s death, why would she so carelessly leave her ticket and her weapon behind?
Working with the FBI, the sheriff began to form another theory. He discovered that a woman matching Callahan’s description had arrived in Cedar City on June 13, 1947, and registered at the Leigh Hotel. Her registration, however, was in the name Mary McCafferty. The name appeared again on the tour bus passenger list, but bus company officials said “this name was not checked back onto the bus for the return trip,” a Salt Lake Telegram story said. Evelyn Callahan’s name was not on the tour bus’s list.
Waitresses in the park’s lodge said that they believed they had seen Callahan with a man, leading the sheriff and the FBI to initiate a search throughout the western states. As the sheriff interviewed family members, however, his position on the cause of Callahan’s death began to change.
He spoke with Hugh M. Callahan, Evelyn’s brother, who gave him a new piece of information: Evelyn knew she was “suffering from a serious ailment.” Sheriff Prince told the Telegram that this illness was “an incurable disease.” Hugh also identified the pistol as one that he knew his sister had at the family home in Oregon.
Evelyn’s mother, Ann Theressa Callahan, related all of the same details when the sheriff interviewed her. These revelations must have drawn the investigation to a close, as there is no more mention of it in the media of that era.
While a number of national parks have fairly high numbers of suicides that take place within their borders, Zion has only two others in its records. One, the death of Dorothy Kaiser in 2003, remained an unsolved case (as described in chapter 3), but it appears that she took her own life on Angels Landing.
The other is the quiet but spectacular death of David Brigham in an apparent leap from Canyon Overlook. Rangers came across Brigham’s vehicle at the overlook trailhead on the evening of February 25, 2009, and seeing no evidence that anyone was on the trail, they began looking for him. They discovered his body at about 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, February 26, at the base of the Great Arch. Brigham had fallen about four hundred feet to his death.
“A preliminary investigation of the fatality by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office and the National Park Service has indicated that the death was most likely a suicide,” the park’s news release said. As is appropriate for this very personal act, no further details were forthcoming.
Lost in Hop Valley
Few hikers familiar with Zion’s trails would consider Hop Valley to be a particularly challenging or dangerous hike. The trail meanders from the Kolob Terrace Road through an open valley, providing expansive views of the canyon walls and crimson cliffs that bring people from all over the world to see this park. As it continues through the canyon, the trail descends until high walls rise on both sides of hikers. This trail can provide one of the most satisfying wilderness hikes in the park, but it requires no scrambling, climbing, canyoneering, wading, or major ascents.
That’s why it’s hard to understand what exactly happened to Corey Buxton, a seventeen-year-old Eagle Scout from Las Vegas, on July 22, 2010, when he collapsed, apparently rolled down into a brushy part of the canyon, and lost his life.
Buxton had accompanied his Scout troop to Zion for a four-day hiking and camping adventure. On the second day, the six-foot-three, 230-pound boy began to struggle with the challenge and the heat, and told his Scout leader to “leave him alone,” according to the park’s incident report. The leader told rangers later than he hiked ahead about one hundred yards and turned around to look for Corey to see if he had followed. Corey was gone.
It took a park search team until the next day to find the boy, using search and rescue dogs to track his whereabouts. His body finally emerged in a patch of thick brush in a ravine about 225 feet from the trail.
What had gone wrong? The dia
gnosis was hyperthermia, a prolonged spike in body temperature beyond what a human being can safely tolerate. Buxton had hiked many trails in Zion before and even completed a Boy Scout badge in wilderness survival. The young man may have become too compromised to recognize the warning signs his own body presented—and as part of a troop and as an Eagle Scout to boot, Buxton may have felt that he had to continue beyond his ability to do so.
“On the rare occasion that something like this happens we all hurt together, we all bond together, and eventually we’ll do our best to figure out what happened and make sure that we do our best to figure out if there’s something that happened that we need to change,” said local Boy Scouts of America executive Phil Bevins in a television interview after Buxton was found. “We take that very seriously.”
With this story of a high school senior meeting a tragic end, we have now revisited the deaths of all ninety-two people who have perished in Zion National Park to date in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the following pages, I offer a collection of common-sense tips to help you make the most of your visit to this park—and to keep you safe while you do so. Please follow this advice, heed the warnings, and make these simple rules part of every outing as you hike, climb, rappel, wade, bicycle, or ride the shuttle buses through one of the most extraordinary places on earth.
Epilogue: How to Stay Alive in Zion National Park
Are you ready to make the commitment to seeing the best of Zion National Park—its canyons, pools, hanging gardens, rivers, peaks, wildflowers, animals, and clear skies—and living to tell the tale?
It’s easier than you may think after reading this book, so let me remind you again: On average, only one to two people per year actually die in the park, and some years no one dies at all. By following a few simple rules and taking some entirely reasonable precautions, you can make the most of your visit and come home with plenty of photos and accounts of your adventures.
Death in Zion National Park Page 14
