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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| This Cracked article is from the other side of the Earth's orbit, and focuses on parks in the US where it's summer then, so "freezing you to death" isn't on the list. Like I said, "don't go outside." There’s an anecdote that floats around lots of National Park-adjacent towns: A tourist is preparing to take their family out on a day-long hike, so they line up their kids and hit ‘em with the essential repellants: first the sunscreen, then the bug spray, then the bear spray. A friend of mine keeps bear spray in his car as a self-defense thing. Now he's facing charges for actually using it. This story almost definitely never happened, but at its core is a universal truth. Locals will say that truth is: “Tourists are stupid and can’t be trusted with access to the wild.” Or, to be fair, access to anywhere. Over 300 people die on National Park land every year. Oh, no, over 300 people. That's like one plane crash. Or, to be fair, compare that to the number of people who die in their own bathroom in the US every year, which I can't find the damn numbers on, but it's way more than 300. I just mention that to underscore that my hatred of the outdoors isn't rooted in fear of death, which can happen anywhere, but because it's the goddamn outdoors. Still, you can't die by National Park if you don't go onto National Park land. I guess technically, you could; the chance is very low but not zero. 5 Lethal Selfies According to one study published in the Journal of Travel Medicine, the world saw 379 fatal selfies between 2008 and 2021. Those are rookie numbers! We have to pump those numbers up! Well, no, not really, but it is true that I find it very difficult to work up sympathy for selfie-related deaths. 4 Nuzzled to Death by Bison Another one it's hard to get teary about. Avoiding bison is surprisingly easy. Billions of people do it every day. But each year, one or two budding influencers are attacked by bison after venturing too close to get a sick shot for the grid. Especially if it's an influenza wannabe. That same season, a woman was gored by a charging bison, and although she and her companion appear to have been doing the right thing (hightailing it) at the time of the attack, she was hurt pretty badly (although, thankfully, survived). Sometimes, though, it's not idiocy, and in those cases, I do feel bad for them. 3 Boiled in Hot Springs Hot springs’ body count is more than double that of bison and bears combined. Yellowstone is a literal minefield of geothermal activity. Admittedly, I've never been to Yellowstone. But from what I understand, there's all kinds of signage warning you against going into the hot springs. Another group for whom I have extremely limited sympathy is the "you can't tell me what to do and I go where I want" crowd. 2 Too Darn Much Water If you don’t bring enough water on a long hike, you’re gonna have a bad time. But it’s too much water that can really sneak up on you. Yep, dihydrogen monoxide is a killer. Let’s start with the frozen kind: Avalanches on National Park land have killed 37 people. Movies, shows and cartoons from when I was a kid led me to vastly overestimate the number of times I'd encounter an avalanche. And quicksand, for that matter. When all that snow thaws out, it gets significantly deadlier. Between 2014 and 2019, there were 314 drowning deaths in the parks, second only to motor vehicle accidents at 354. Those tend to happen when someone falls off a boat in a lake or a river, and they’re often selfie-assisted. I don't mean to be rude, here, but there's a reason why life jackets exist. But the scariest water-related death, for my money, is flash flooding. The slot canyons of the Grand Canyon are enormous tributaries, geologically designed over millennia to collect rainwater from intense desert storms and deliver it to the Colorado River far below within minutes. I'll let "designed" slide. But yeah, flash flooding is scary as hell. 1 Just Freaking Explode Everything Let’s travel back to Yellowstone for a moment. The source of all that geothermal activity is our old friend, the Yellowstone Caldera. Huh, and here I thought it was because it contained a direct portal to Hell. That’s a supervolcano lurking just beneath the surface that has erupted every half-million years or so, and is currently running 40,000 years late. That's not how return periods work. Should the Great Pimple ever decide to pop — which it could at literally any moment — it’s estimated that 90,000 people would die instantly, and lava could splash from Calgary to Los Angeles. Just to underscore the point I made earlier: your chance of dying by National Park if you never set foot in a National Park is low, but never zero. Still, we're way more likely to get nuked to oblivion first. |
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