Rangers using rappelling gear have recovered the bodies of a man and a woman who fell this week from Yosemite National Park’s Taft Point, a popular overlook that sits 3,500 feet above Yosemite Valley.
A helicopter from the California Highway Patrol assisted the rangers in removing the bodies late Thursday afternoon, Jamie Richards, a Yosemite spokeswoman, said Friday.
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The two victims were located about 800 feet down the side of a steep cliff from Taft Point, which is located near the end of Glacier Point Road and has sweeping views of Yosemite Valley, El Capitan and Yosemite Falls.
Authorities have not yet been able to identify the two victims or how they died, she said.
“We haven’t yet determined what yet happened in this tragic incident,” Richards said. “It’s going to take us several days before we know more.”
Taft Point has been one of Yosemite’s iconic tourist spots for more than 100 years. Named for President William Howard Taft, who visited it in 1909, the point has been a site of countless photos over the decades, proposals and even some weddings near the overlook.
It sits roughly 3,500 feet above Yosemite Valley — a vast distance roughly two-thirds of a mile up — atop enormous granite walls that tower over the roads and hotels below.
A relatively short hiking trail from Glacier Point Road leads to Taft Point, which has a metal railing at its most popular vantage point.
“There is a railing at the overlook but there are plenty of places you can go near there without railings,” she said. “Yosemite is an inherently wild place.”
Richards said that the railing is intact. Asked whether the couple may have fallen while talking a photograph or hiking on the edge of the cliffs, or whether they jumped on purpose, she said the investigation is likely to take several weeks and so far investigators have no witnesses.
Several park visitors noticed the bodies Wednesday evening. They alerted rangers, who determined that with darkness falling, it was too late to try and recover them from the precariously steep flanks of the cliff.
So far this year, “more than 10” people have died at Yosemite, Richards said. Typically every year, a few dozen die or suffer life-threatening injuries, including heart attacks, car accidents, drownings or hikers or rock climbers falling from steep places, she said.
Put in context, 5 million people visit Yosemite every year.
Typically when people die at the park, the bodies are taken to coroners in neighboring counties, but Yosemite officials lead the investigation,as they are doing in the most recent case.
There have been several high profile falls recently at Yosemite.
On June 2, two experienced rock climbers, Tim Klein, 42, of Palmdale, and Jason Wells, 46, of Boulder, Colorado, died in a fall of about 1,000 feet from El Capitan, the huge granite wall on the north side of Yosemite Valley.
A month earlier, Asish Penugonda, 29, a native of India living in New York City, died after he slipped and fell from the Half Dome cables while hiking there as a thunderstorm approached. Penugonda worked as a biochemist with Siemens Healthcare, based in New Milford, N.J.
Last month, 18-year-old Tomer Frankfurter, a resident of Jerusalem, fell more than 800 feet to his death while attempting to take a photograph of himself near Nevada Fall. The young man was on a two-month trip to the United States before he planned to enter military service in Israel.
And in 2015, two men, world-famous wingsuit flier Dean Potter, and his friend Graham Hunt, died when they jumped off Taft Point and hit a rocky outcropping at 100 mph while filming themselves.
Wingsuit flying involves people wearing suits with wings sewn between their arms, body and legs. It is a form of BASE-jumping, an acronym for parachuting off buildings, antennas, spans or bridges, and earth formations such as Taft Point. BASE-jumping and wingsuit flying are illegal in Yosemite.
“No one but Potter and Hunt will every truly know what happened,” park investigators concluded in a report obtained by the Associated Press.”
