Each year on National Park Service-managed areas, about 240 people pass away from drownings, falls, and homicides. To determine how it occurs, we examined mortality data spanning 17 years.
Over 300 million people visit one of the 428 locations under National Park Service management each year. Some intend to go on a weekend long hiking trip through the woods, some to climb a challenging peak, and many more simply to enjoy the scenery from a scenic drive or overlook. However, a small number of unlucky guests experience a tragic finish to their journey. Every year, about 243 people pass away on NPS grounds. That’s not many, given the number of people that visit the parks: It comes out to less than one in a million deaths with roughly 312 million visits in 2022. Even still, those few deaths have a way of grabbing our interest. The travel website Outforia published a report in 2021 that claimed to provide the most.
As an illustration, consider Grand Canyon, one of the most popular national parks in the country, which was named the most dangerous national park in America based on the amount of fatalities that occurred there in Outforia’s study and the stories that followed. (We gave Denali that dubious distinction after adjusting for infrequently visited outliers and weighting deaths by visitor count).
Being unaware of the risks associated with visiting a national park might be risky in and of itself. Physiologist, retired Navy officer, and former president of the Wilderness Medical Society Brad Bennett notes that many park visitors overestimate their own capabilities, improperly pack or prepare, and underestimate the degree to which a strenuous hike can aggravate preexisting medical conditions such as COPD and heart disease.
Recently, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the NPS made available mortality records dating back 17 years. We examined the data to find out how and why people pass away at the parklands we adore, which records 3,985 fatalities between 2007 and 2023. Mortalities that took place at the 63 national parks in the United States, national seashores, monuments, recreation areas, and other locations under the NPS’s authority are all included in the records. The majority of entries contained facts on the victim, such as their gender, age range, and cause of death. We were also able to link certain entries to the victim’s identity and obtain further information about their circumstances by using publicly available news sources. We discovered this.
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