Posted on 01/08/2023 11:42:23 AM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
Two people were killed on Tuesday in a rockslide at the Highway 140 entrance of Yosemite National Park. The victims have been identified by Park officials as 51-year-old Georgios Theocharous and 35-year-old Ming Yan, a married couple from San Jose.
The incident occurred around 9 am when the couple were driving on El Portal Road, near Big Oak Flat Road. Approximately 185 tons of rock fell 1,000 feet onto the roadway below, pushing the couple’s Dodge Ram onto the embankment of the Merced River.
Following a brief closure, Highway 140 once again opened to the public, only to close again on Friday due to another rockfall.
Rockfalls are a common occurrence in Yosemite National Park, but fatalities are rare. This latest rock slide serves as a reminder of the dangers of visiting the park, and park officials are urging visitors to be aware of their surroundings and to follow safety guidelines when hiking or driving through the park.
(Excerpt) Read more at activenorcal.com ...
They were headed into a Yosemite for a nice get-away on a winter morning and BAM! Squashed like a bug. (well, not exactly, but close)
They weren't even doing anything stupid like crossing fences to get closer to waterfalls. They were just driving into Yosemite National Park!
There rockslides in this area in November 2016, January 2017 and June 2017.
WOW! Wrong place at the wrong time.
Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.
Right on! Excellent advice! If only these folks had been paying attention, they would've known a bunch of rocks a thousand feet up were about to let loose and crush them. Thank goodness for bureaucrats.
Obviously Globull Warming.
They were driving either too fast or too slow, likely an SUV was involved. RIP.
New tagline!
Looks like someone hasn’t engineered that road right. Wouldn’t be surprised if some environmental rules prevent them from some decent mitigation work. Happens all over the Rockies and can be done pretty good.
Georgios Theocharous...
I’m not saying it was aliens...
The question on everyone’s mind:
Were they vaxxed?
Because it would have been worse if they weren’t.
/sarc
Btw, I almost lost control of a van I was driving on Highway 9 because a mudslide had covered the road surface with slippery wet adobe.
This was during that winter of ‘85-’86.
Mountain roads can be hazardous!
I camped at Yosemite back in 1984. At night, I could hear periodic rockslides in the distance.
The summit of El Capitan has seen many sightseers slide off to their deaths. Sometimes, it includes a “chain” of would-be—but dead—rescuers. Some include family members.
Sad.
“...park officials are urging visitors to be aware of their surroundings...”
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
Contents of a sign that should be on the wall of all pompous bureaucrats.
Just remembered, Yosemite was discussed in a sermon!
https://www.lutheranhour.org/sermon.asp?articleid=37753
Text: Luke 21:28
Yosemite Valley, California, is a precarious, ecological wonder where devastating forces clear the way for new creation. On July 10, 1996, at 6:52 p.m., a slab of granite, the length and width of a football field, cut loose from the top of a 2,000-foot cliff above Yosemite Valley. The 90,000-ton slab free falls for 10 seconds. The impact would register on seismographs a hundred miles away as a 2.1 magnitude earthquake. Upon impact, it sends forth a shockwave of compressed air and pulverized granite like a massive bulldozer advancing at 200 miles an hour. The blast levels a thousand trees the size of telephone poles, uprooting some, snapping others in half 40 feet up the trunk. Dust shrouds the valley in a cloudy chaos, blacking out the setting sun.
Because of the late hour, most of Yosemite National Park's 20,000 or so visitors had gone home for the day. But many who had lingered were injured, and one man standing at a snack bar, hundreds of feet away from the impact was killed by the exploding rock.
Events like this are not uncommon in Yosemite. No one can precisely predict when they're going to happen, but they happen all the time. The first recorded rock fall in Yosemite occurred in 1872 when a similar blast knocked a building off its foundation. Today, around 80 rock falls are reported every year within that seven-mile valley. The day after the ground shook and the sky fell in 1996, news crews rushed into the valley to interview visitors and park rangers. One woman whose family had been in the area of the rock fall hours before it happened was still visibly shaken. "It's definitely given me a sense of insecurity," she said. "I'm looking around now to make sure there are no big boulders above me. All you see when you look up are mountain sides of pure rock." One park ranger put it candidly, "There is no way to guarantee anyone's safety in the park at any time. We are not risk-free standing here right now. The only way we could make it safe would be to close the park entirely."
The rest of the sermon is at the link!
Yes indeed...
Snicker...
I know! Isn’t that dumbest advice possible? I can see tourists looking 1,000 feet up the cliffs, watching for landslides to squash them and...have a head-on collision with another vehicle.
I declined to jump off El Capitan with some friends, who all made it OK. Too wild for me.
Rockfalls are a common occurrence in Yosemite National Park.
Geologists call mountains waste mass for a reason they are always on the move.
Lol
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