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 double-double seeking, snow-chasing, short-cutting, vertical feet collector
4523 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2004 : 1:28 PM
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One life terminated, another forever haunted
What would have happened if the companion and she had stayed together?
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MARATHONER FROM FALMOUTH FOUND DEAD IN GRAND CANYON Author(s): Julie D. Polovina, Globe Correspondent Date: July 13, 2004 Page: B3 Section: Metro/Region
A Falmouth woman who had placed 15th in this year's Boston Marathon was found dead in the Grand Canyon last weekend. No foul play was suspected.
Margaret L. Bradley, 24, was found by National Park Service rangers at 2 p.m. Saturday in a drainage known as Cremation below the Tonto Trail, said Maureen Oltrogge, a National Park Service public affairs officer. "She was an excellent runner," said Brenda Barrera, the managing editor of Chicago Athlete, which named Bradley their June Athlete of the Month. "She was our Athlete of the Month because she balanced the demanding schedule of being in medical school, volunteering at the Free Children's Clinic, and running 90 miles a week. She also had an effervescent personality."
Oltrogge said Bradley went on a run starting at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon at the Grandview Trailhead on Thursday with a companion from Flagstaff, Ariz.
They were traveling to the Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor when they ran out of water. Bradley decided to separate from her companion to search for more, Oltrogge said.
Bradley's companion met an employee from US Geological Survey on his way back up to the rim. The employee provided him with water and helped him return to Flagstaff.
Thinking that Bradley had gone on to Phantom Ranch, the companion left a message for her there saying he couldn't make it to their destination and that he went back to Flagstaff, Oltrogge said.
Bradley's family was supposed to meet her in Flagstaff on Friday and reported her missing to the Flagstaff police Saturday.
On Saturday morning, the National Park Service began searching for Bradley. Park rangers discovered her body that afternoon after conducting an aerial search, Oltrogge said.
The National Park Service will conduct an investigation into Bradley's death.
Her body was brought to the Coconino County Medical Examiner's Office in Flagstaff where forensic investigator Jeremy Thompson said it appears that her death was "due to the elements."
Bradley was the 15th American woman to finish the Boston Marathon, with a time of 3:04:54, was an All-American on the University of Chicago cross country team, and June's Clif Bar Athlete of the Month, Barrera said.
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 adventure seeking, peak-bagging, high-enduring, strong and silent forest gnome
N49°09', W122°47'
Canada
3819 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2004 : 2:58 PM
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OMG 
I'm AMAZED "the companion" didn't tell the ranger that there was another runner on the trail. What a senseless tragedy. |
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Castlegar, B.C.
Canada
1249 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2004 : 4:08 PM
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Tragic !
We have all ran out of water for short periods here and there over the years, it's no fun.
You learn to pre-scout your trip for current water levels of creeks and what have you before going on any lenghthy trip !
Sounds like lack of water was a factor here ? |
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double-double seeking, snow-chasing, short-cutting, vertical feet collector
4523 Posts |
Posted - 07/19/2004 : 5:13 PM
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| yes - there are a number of newspaper articles covering this tragedy. The above was from the Boston area, whereas the Arizona articles describing this incident point to dehydration. |
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Vancouver, BC
Canada
50 Posts |
Posted - 07/20/2004 : 1:05 PM
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What a shame. Running out of water is bad enough.
My condolences to all involved.
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Can't Keep Me Down |
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Moxie scambler of pinnacles, tireless leader haunting the CDN/US border climbing everything in sight
Burnaby, BC
Canada
1272 Posts |
Posted - 07/20/2004 : 1:48 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Kodiak
Sounds like lack of water was a factor here ?
Sounds like a lack of respect for conditions was a factor. Tragic indeed. |
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double-double seeking, snow-chasing, short-cutting, vertical feet collector
4523 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2004 : 6:35 PM
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Running dry
www.latimes.com
A desert oven like the Grand Canyon can quickly turn hikers and
runners into 'heat zombies.' Hydration mistakes can kill. By
Christopher Reynolds Times Staff Writer
August 17, 2004
It's nearly noon, and the morning's hikers scramble out of the
baking inner canyon, wheezing and dripping. In a room a few hun-
dred yards from the South Rim, supervising ranger Marc Yeston
touches a green pen to a wall map and traces a long, wriggling
path. Then he makes a triangle.
Here, he says, is the spot where they found Margaret Bradley, a
24-year-old University of Chicago medical student and marathoner.
Just three months before, the 115-pound Bradley had finished the
Boston Marathon in a few ticks over three hours, a solid perfor-
mance in temperatures well over 80.
"I focused on keeping myself hydrated," she told the magazine
Chicago Athlete afterward, "and not letting the adrenaline from
the crowd make me do something stupid."
But last month, when she and a companion decided to try a 27-mile
trail run in a single day, that caution was missing. A cascading
series of miscalculations, say rangers, turned this scholar-ath-
lete into the Grand Canyon's first dehydration fatality in four
years.
Telling her story, rangers look to their feet, grope for words,
trail off in midsentence. She was younger than most of them, and
probably fitter. And now all that was left was an excruciating
lesson in miscommunication and biochemistry.
Serious challenge
In a single hour, a hiker in desert heat can easily lose a liter
of moisture through sweat ? maybe, some experts say, as many as
three liters (a liter is slightly more than a quart).
Without water, write authors Michael P. Ghiglieri and Thomas M.
Myers in their book "Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon," dehy-
dration, hyperthermia and exertion in the canyon can "turn peo-
ple, inch by inch, into heat zombies?. Kids and young adults seem
to run at full function in the heat, sweating appropriately and
seemingly going strong, but abruptly, when dehydration kicks in,
they crash quickly and often unexpectedly. And die."
Those threats are compounded by the shape of the land: Mountains
rebuff the unfit and unprepared in short order, but the canyon ?
"the upside-down mountain," locals say ? begins as a pushover,
all downhill trail and mild temperatures at 7,000 feet. For
decades, with signs, brochures and newsletters, rangers have
struggled to make hikers understand the challenges that wait be-
low.
These challenges are serious enough that the park created a spe-
cial Preventative Search and Rescue unit seven years ago after a
flurry of dehydration and heatstroke cases in the canyon. Most
summer days, rangers station themselves a mile or two or three
down the busiest trails, chatting up hikers as they pass, check-
ing to see if fitness and water supplies match their itineraries.
But it's a tricky job, because rangers can't watch every trail
and a ranger can't order a hiker off the trail for seeming unpre-
pared. And at least once a day, says supervisor Bonnie Taylor,
somebody defies her warnings and heads on down.
"Our job is not to harass them," Taylor says. "Our job is to un-
derstand that they understand the situation here."
Critical errors
Before she headed to college in Chicago, Bradley was raised in
Falmouth, Mass. She hadn't spent much time in the desert. But
she wasn't easily daunted.
At the University of Chicago, she had earned a double degree in
biology and Earth sciences, then went on to med school. She
played violin in the university symphony and worked summers at
the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. And as a
runner, putting in up to 90 miles a week, she'd competed in Divi-
sion III national championships and earned all-American status.
To prepare for the canyon, she ran in the hills around Flagstaff
for a few days. She also found a running partner, a Flagstaff
man in his late 20s or 30s with whom she shared a Chicago connec-
tion. On July 8, they agreed to take on the canyon.
Rangers interviewed this man. They say they are not accusing him
of wrongdoing and have refused repeated requests to identify him,
citing his privacy and saying Bradley's family asked them to omit
his name from public accounts. (A Freedom of Information Act re-
quest by The Times is pending.) Bradley's parents declined to
comment for this article.
At least part of the tale, however, can be gleaned from rangers
who were there. By Park Service accounts, the runners began
their day about 9 a.m. at Grandview Point, the highest spot along
the canyon's South Rim, where the trail head is 7,400 feet above
sea level, nearly 5,000 feet above the river.
Here is where the two runners made their first mistakes. They set
off nearly four hours after sunrise, several hours later than
rangers advise distance hikers to begin on summer days, and they
were traveling dangerously light. Bradley's companion had four
liters of water. She carried fruit, three protein bars and just
two bottles of water (about 1.5 liters). They carried no maps,
and Bradley apparently had no flashlight or headlamp.
From Grandview Point, the two headed down an unmaintained, water-
less path built by a prospector about 100 years ago, descending
2,600 vertical feet in just three miles. From there they planned
to descend farther, then follow the Tonto Trail across the noto-
riously hot and shadeless Tonto Plateau, about 1,000 feet above
the river. Then they'd climb back out on the busier South Kaibab
Trail, which tops off at 7,000 feet.
It's unclear why they thought they could do this route in a day,
or where they expected to get water. "Not recommended during sum-
mer," says the Park Service's free trail guide. "No water."
"This would be a two- or three-day backpack trip with a lot of
planning," says Yeston, who served as incident commander. "And
the optimum time to do it would be fall," adds Ken Phillips, the
park's search and rescue coordinator.
The dicey distance, the scant supplies: Is this the kind of
hubris that could afflict any gonzo hiker or runner? In runners'
chat rooms, speculation has been divided between those who see
this as rare bad judgment and those who see it as an all-too-com-
mon mistake that happened to wind up more dramatically than most.
"It doesn't make sense ? but people do it all the time," one run-
ner wrote.
In the first seven months of this year, park personnel have car-
ried nearly 200 hikers out of the canyon by helicopter, most of
them suffering from "environmental causes" ? exhaustion, dehydra-
tion, sometimes water intoxication, which happens when hikers
drink plenty but fail to take in salt to help keep their elec-
trolytes balanced.
Among runners, there's always a temptation to carry as little wa-
ter as you can get away with, because it's heavy. A single liter
weighs more than two pounds. If they followed the canyon
rangers' recommendations of one to two liters for each hour on
the trail, every runner and hiker on a four-hour excursion would
set off with eight to 16 pounds of water on board.
But if your starting point is the Grandview Point trail head, it
doesn't take long to realize the rangers have a point. For every
1,000 feet in descent, canyon veterans say, the temperature is
likely to rise 3 to 6 degrees. At the river's edge that day, the
high would be 105.
Boiling point
By 3 p.m. they were in trouble. Bradley's companion couldn't run
anymore. He stopped, overheated and exhausted, and curled up in
the shade of a bush to rest. In six hours they'd covered about
12 miles, with 15 still to go. Now the temperature was over 100,
and their water was gone.
As a hiker heats up, says Yeston, "the body is going to start to
divert blood to the parts of the brain that are more basic. The
parts of the brain that you might have used to make nuanced deci-
sions about your situation ? they're compromised. Long before a
person seems drunk or delirious, they're already going to have a
subtle loss of fine motor coordination and critical thinking ?
and even difficulty referencing past experiences."
The two made a fallback plan, rangers say the companion told them
later: He would stay put, and Bradley, the stronger athlete,
would go on.
This, rangers and others say, was another big mistake. Hikers al-
most always fare better by sticking together. But in a short
life, Bradley had learned to outrace common expectations.
"She was incredibly tough mentally," says Paul Peters, owner of
the Universal Sole running-shoe store in Chicago. "Really intense
but always smiling."
Bradley, who lived near the store, joined its running team last
fall as part of her training for the Boston Marathon. She'd join
in for burgers and beer after Monday-night fun runs of eight or
10 miles, and she'd hang out at the store during her rare idle
hours, always angling to learn some new training techniques from
the other serious runners who worked there. She'd run hard in a
5K in New York on a Saturday, then do an 8K in Chicago the next
day.
"No matter what the conditions, no matter what was going on, she
would go out and try to win every race she ran," Peters says.
When he heard about what happened in the canyon, he adds, "I
could definitely see her pushing herself beyond what anybody else
would have done, in terms of not stopping until her body just
gave out."
Now, instead of following the Tonto Trail to the South Kaibab
Trail, then heading up and out as the two had planned, Bradley
would look for help and water. She would follow the Tonto to the
South Kaibab, but turn downhill toward Phantom Ranch at the bot-
tom of the canyon. That meant 11 more miles.
Without a partner, she did what she was exceptionally good at:
She persisted.
Fatal assumption
In the early hours of the next day, Bradley's companion woke
alone and parched on the Tonto Plateau. But it was cooler now,
and he felt well enough to make his way toward the South Kaibab
Trail. He believed he saw the tracks of Bradley's Reeboks, ac-
cording to rangers.
Near the intersection of the Tonto and Kaibab trails, he was
saved: A U.S. Geological Service employee, who was carrying a
satellite phone, spotted him. The USGS employee came to his
side, found him suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, and
used the phone to get a ranger's directions to an emergency sup-
ply of water cached nearby.
This was about 7 a.m. Friday, about 22 hours after the trail run
began, and it could have marked the beginning of a campaign to
find Bradley. But "nowhere in that conversation did we get infor-
mation that he was a runner, that he'd crossed the Tonto, or that
there were two of them," says Yeston. (The USGS employee declined
to be interviewed for this article.)
Apparently, the companion had come to believe that Bradley had
reached Phantom Ranch. Somehow ? and the rescue rangers shake
their heads at this ? the runner hiked out of the canyon (with
the phone-bearing USGS employee as his guide), held conversations
with a commercial guide and a trail crew worker, and got a ride
back to Flagstaff, yet never transmitted the idea that his part-
ner might need rescuing.
Through the trail crew worker, he did send a message to Phantom
Ranch for Bradley, explaining that he'd abandoned the hike and
would leave her car at the South Kaibab Trail head on the South
Rim. But that information alone set off no alarms; rangers and
Phantom Ranch staffers hear several times a day from separated
hikers rearranging their plans.
Meanwhile, Bradley's family had planned to meet her on Friday af-
ternoon in Flagstaff. When she didn't show, the family reported
her missing to Flagstaff police and rangers between 1 and 4 a.m.
Saturday, setting off a flurry of phone calls to local lodgings.
By now it was about 18 hours since Bradley's companion had en-
countered his USGS rescuer. But still, nobody in authority knew
the whole story.
That moment of horror and recognition didn't come until about
6:30 a.m. Saturday, when Bradley's brother reached her trail com-
panion by telephone. The companion then called the park's dis-
patcher at 6:50 a.m. ? "and now," says Yeston, standing by the
map ? "all the dots connect."
Trapped
Within 90 minutes, the Park Service had 20 people on the case.
Within five hours, a Park Service helicopter crew had spotted a
body at Cremation Creek, 200 to 300 feet below the Tonto Trail.
Before he was rescued, her companion kept descending on the trail
and must have passed within 500 vertical feet of Bradley. The pi-
lot brought the chopper closer to see if the roar and rotor wash
would rouse her. Nothing. Margaret Bradley was gone.
"She was in a sleeping position, using the pack as a pillow,"
Yeston says. "A fetal position."
A red visor lay near the body. An uneaten protein bar, not much
good for hydration, was in her pack. The rescue team pronounced
her dead at 2:25 p.m., says Jeremy Thompson, forensic examiner
for Coconino County, and estimated time of death at 12 to 24
hours before that. The USGS employee with the satellite phone had
run into her partner about 31 hours earlier.
After an autopsy, the medical examiner classified the cause of
death as accidental "dehydration due to environmental heat expo-
sure."
Given the way light and heat bounce around in the depths of the
canyon, rangers say, the temperatures that Friday at Cremation
Creek could easily have reached 120 degrees. Like many thirsty,
desperate and often delirious hikers over the years, Bradley had
apparently decided to leave the trail and blaze a more direct
route to the water.
"When all that stuff comes over you, and you realize you're ap-
proaching what you've read about ? it's an almost overwhelming
disorientation," says Michael Olson, a longtime triathlete and
marathoner from Flagstaff. Olson, 39, says he has made the
23-mile rim-to-rim run half a dozen times, always in October, and
would never touch a Grandview-Tonto-Kaibab itinerary in the sum-
mer.
Leaving the trail, Bradley had descended two dry waterfalls and
then a 20-foot "pour-off" cliff without injury, only to find a
50-foot cliff waiting next, reports Tom Clausing, the park's
emergency medical services coordinator, who was among the first
to reach her body.
"She slid into a natural terrain trap, from which there was no
climbing out," Clausing says. She wound up about 500 feet above
the waters of the Colorado.
Clausing wonders whether it was day or night when Bradley made
those decisions. The South Kaibab Trail, he says, is nearly vis-
ible from the area where she must have left the Tonto Trail. If
she'd stayed on the Tonto for another mile, Clausing says, she'd
have hit the South Kaibab Trail, where a Park Service telephone
waits and foot traffic is thick.
"She'd have run into 100 people the next day," Clausing says.
Later, rangers retraced the hikers' paths, alert to possibilities
of deliberate wrongdoing. They found "not even a hint of it, and
we looked hard," Yeston says.
Bradley's death, with its long list of improbable contributing
circumstances, resonates differently for many of those who worked
to prevent it.
"This was a very tough one for us ? a preventable tragedy," says
Phillips, the search and rescue coordinator. "Two athletes, and
the one that's more fit is the one that ends up dying."
The next morning, 13 days after Bradley's death, ranger Bonnie
Taylor is working a preventative rescue shift on the scorching
Bright Angel Trail.
In the space of an hour, Taylor will gently, or bluntly if it
seems necessary, urge several hiking parties to trim their ambi-
tions or drink up on the spot. Young and old, men and women,
kids and couples, fit and flabby: She approaches them all. She
likes to start by asking where they're from, because it hardly
matters how they answer.
"Nobody," she says, "is from anywhere that's this hot."
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
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The trouble with the global village is all those global village idiots |
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adventure seeking, peak-bagging, high-enduring, strong and silent forest gnome
N49°09', W122°47'
Canada
3819 Posts |
Posted - 08/20/2004 : 7:00 PM
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Thanks for the followup, C Wall.
A month later - a few more answers, but still the same questions.
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Who's yer Gnome!!  |
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269 Posts |
Posted - 09/04/2004 : 10:31 AM
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SW- Thank you for the great work on this story. I was really at a lost for word when I read it. It was really unfortunate what happened where many small events led to a death of a wonderful young lady. There will be many questions of what if they did this or that. I guess we will never know the facts.
Why this story hits home hard for me is due to the fact that I was on the same trail a few months ago before this tragedy took place. I have experienced the heat of the Canyon and know what it feels like to be a" heat zombie". Let me tell you it is not fun!!!
There are many things that trouble me with this story like late start, lack of water, distance travelled and etc. The one point that I wanted to home in on is where she was found at Cremation Creek. This is a tricky part of the trail so one has to keep their eyes open. I recalled when I passed this point of the trail, our team followed the same path she took. However we realized our mistake and back tracked to our initial position or we would of arrived at the location that she was found.
This really left a sick feeling in my stomach because she might of mis-read the trail thinking she was going the right way. It was some thing that I thought should be brought up but was not stated.
To her family and friends,: "My sincere condolence in your time of grieving.I hope you find some comfort in your darkest hour and remember how she touched each and everyone of you in a positive light."
Rest in Peace!!!
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Edited by - explorer on 09/04/2004 10:54 AM |
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154 Posts |
Posted - 09/04/2004 : 1:33 PM
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Just shows that one should be very careful picking a hiking partner.
I wonder what her partnet was thinking???  |
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double-double seeking, snow-chasing, short-cutting, vertical feet collector
4523 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2004 : 9:02 PM
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He will have this on his conscience for the rest of his life.
I am rather surprised that his name has remained unpublished by the media.
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Procrastination: if you wait until tomorrow, it will still be now - only
later |
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269 Posts |
Posted - 09/09/2004 : 12:03 PM
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R- I think her partner was not thinking!!! Of course we were not in their predictment so we do not know what really went on. I assumed that both parties were dehyrated and desperated. Correct decision making would not be high on their agenda.
SW- It is strange that everyone is keeping a close lip about the name of the male runner. I am not sure what the real reason is. It is probably under police investigation due to the strange nature of this case. What do I mean? Well,they did not know each other before the run, late start, separating on the trail,he not reporting her missing and etc. I have reservation about this story. |
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Tragedy in the Grand Canyon
