Hiking accidents can happen due to carelessness or lack of fitness. At the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, a tourist from Boston, Massachusetts, wanted to get a closer look at the latest eruption on 11 June.
The 30-year-old man wandered around the Byron Ledge Trail in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park at 9 p.m. and did not notice the edge of the cliff because he had no flashlight.
He fell 30 feet down the cliff, the New York Post (NYP) quoted the National Park Service as reporting.
Fortunately, a tree cushioned his fall and he suffered only minor facial injuries. If he hadn’t hit the tree, the hiker would have fallen 100 more feet, which could have been fatal.
Rescuers pulled him from the tree hours later.
In California, a father and son were hiking on the slopes of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada range on 10 June.
Ryan Mach and his son, Zane, were descending seven miles back to their car after summiting when the 14-year-old said he saw snowmen and Kermit the Frog, one of the characters in the defunct children’s TV program, “The Muppet Show.”
The two stopped after Zane told his father they had “already finished the hike multiple times over,” according to NYP.
Twice the son moved toward a ledge near the trail, saying he was going to the car and getting dinner, but his dad grabbed him before he could go over, NYP reports.
Then Zane walked toward the edge a third time and Ryan could not reach him on time. He fell an estimated 120 feet down the slope before hitting the bottom, according to NYP and SFGate.
The boy suffered severe head trauma plus a broken ankle, finger and pelvis, SFGate reported. Rescuers brought him down after six hours and he was airlifted to a hospital in Las Vegas.
The father blamed his son’s erratic behavior and thoughts to exhaustion, sleep deprivation, dehydration, and altitude sickness, as a lack of oxygen causes hallucinations.
To the doctors’ surprise, Zane survived and is recovering.