Posted on 09/23/2025 12:48:09 PM PDT by CedarDave
TAOS — The sidewalks along the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge are usually thronged with tourists every day of the week.
Sightseers peer over the bridge’s 4-foot tall railings into the viridescent water coursing through the canyon 600 feet below. Couples and families stop to take selfies against some of the most dramatic backdrops New Mexico has to offer.
But on Monday, the bridge was conspicuously empty — save for drivers thrumming across the 1,280-foot span, where a bundle of flowers and dozens of rosaries along the metal railings memorialized a local teen’s suspected suicide over the weekend.
It is the third such death to take place at the Rio Grande Gorge in three weeks and the sixth so far there this year, double the annual average of three cited by officials in previous years. Two people died at the bridge in suspected suicides on Sept. 2 and 6. Deputies successfully intervened after another person had driven to the bridge on Sept. 9 with reported intentions of self-harm.
The New Mexico Department of Health reported this month that suicides rose 9% in the state from 2023 to 2024, from from 470 to 512 deaths.
In response to the spike in suicides this year, New Mexico Department of Transportation Cabinet Secretary Rick Serna ordered the bridge be temporarily closed to foot traffic. Serna was acting at the request of Taos County Sheriff Steve Miera, whose staff has recovered the bodies of dozens of suicide victims from below the bridge since it opened in 1965.
NMDOT, which manages the bridge, also hired a third security guard for the site, a vehicle to allow them to conduct patrols at both of its ends, and signage to notify drivers to not stop and barring pedestrians from walking along its sidewalks.
(Excerpt) Read more at abqjournal.com ...
“”””I can think of better ways to die than falling kicking puking and screaming for 6 or 7 seconds to hit a bunch of jagged lava rocks.””””
No kidding, I was Airborne and have done a little rock climbing, a lot of 100 foot helicopter rappelling, some STABO and various goof off height stuff, but one of the last ways of dying I would choose, would be death from heights.
Why someone would choose jumping to their death is baffling, even in a burning high rise I would search for a different way of dying.
Never start with the word “sorry”. No need to be and the rest of what you said is spot on.
In true New Mexican fashion, they can fix the problem by adding another six feet of chicken wire.
Simple, effective low-cost solution to what may, or may not be, a problem. Simply pass a law making it illegal to jump off the bridge. Problem solved!
This is known as reasonable, common sense bridge control.
Are you maybe thinking of the Royal Gorge Bridge in Canon City?
You should see the Peter Skene Ogden viewpoint in central Oregon, where U.S. 97 crosses the Crooked River north of Redmond. There’s a part of the publicly-accessible area where the only barrier is a stone wall a little over two feet high that runs literally along the edge of a 300-foot drop, as in when you lean over the wall you are looking straight down to the river. The wall’s not even waist high to an adult and it’s been like that since the park was built, though they moved the parking area back from the edge some years ago. I just looked on Google Earth, and the wall is still the same, as of last month.
I don’t know how often people commit suicide at that location. I never heard of any, though I have heard of dogs hopping over the wall only to discover that it’s a LOT higher on the other side. In 1961 two women threw the bodies of two murdered children into the gorge from the nearby highway bridge.
“ As long as we continue to do nothing, this problem will persist,” Miera told the Journal. He has pushed for an “anti-climb fence” for the Bridge”
“When stupidity ceases to be fatal, mankind ceases to evolve.”
-the Internet.
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