Climbers detail Yosemite horror
Rockfall killed British tourist, injured wife on ‘dream holiday’
Ryan Sheridan, a 25-year-old climber from Buffalo, N.Y., was with two friends on what is known as the Waterfall Route of Yosemite’s El Capitan when they witnessed horror unfold below — a fatal rockfall that has once again exposed the powerful and at times dangerous natural forces at work in the famed wilderness.
It was Wednesday afternoon. A granite slab the size of an apartment building broke off, hit a lower wall and rained boulders on top of a man and a woman who were walking 1,000 feet below, a pair of British tourists celebrating their “dream holiday.”
The cascade of boulders was so immense that the climbers didn’t believe anybody could survive it, but then, Sheridan said, they spotted a woman in an orange helmet attempting to climb out from between a boulder and the cliff wall. As she struggled, another boulder broke loose and was free-falling directly toward her.
“It’s an inherent risk. The risk is minimal, but it’s dramatic when it happens. You can’t let fear control your life.” Ryan Sheridan, climber
“We were yelling at her, telling her to clear the area, when the rock, which was about the size of a school bus, hit a lower, angled slab and split in half and went in either direction around her,” Sheridan recalled.
“That’s when I witnessed from above somebody wearing all green running back into the rockfall. We were yelling down the entire time, ‘Don’t go in there.’ We saw him meet with the girl in the orange helmet briefly, and then the second fall happened.”
Sheridan said he lost track of the man in green, apparently British tourist Andrew Foster, amid the dust, but later saw search and rescue teams recover his body.
“It’s an inherent risk,” Sheridan said, trying to explain a reality that every climber and adventurer in Yosemite faces. “The risk is minimal, but it’s dramatic when it happens.” He added, “You can’t let fear control your life.”
Many people are reconsidering this risk in the aftermath of the tragedy and heroism that Sheridan witnessed that day. Danger is a constant in Yosemite, but two rockfalls that peeled off the fabled 3,000-foot edifice this week were an eye-opener for hundreds of hardened rock climbers who had converged in the valley for an annual five-day garbage cleanup and restoration program called Yosemite Facelift.
Foster, 32, of Cardiff, Wales, was killed, and his wife, Lucy, was pinned under debris and seriously injured in the first rockfall.
The second fall Thursday was even bigger, rolling out over the highway toward the Merced River. This time, one person was injured, a motorist from Naples, Fla., named Jim Evans, who was struck in the head by a rock or branch that flew through his sunroof.
The gravity of the situation came into focus Friday as witnesses described Foster’s effort to save his wife. Witnesses said the couple had come down from a climb and were walking at the base of the wall with their gear shortly before 2 p.m.
The Fosters, who shared a love of climbing and the outdoors, married in 2016 and were traveling for a year, but their “dream holiday” was Yosemite, according to reports in British newspapers.
“Yosemite is an awesome place and for many climbers is one of the many places to go before you die,” Foster once wrote in a personal blog.
Lucy Foster reportedly suffered a punctured lung, among other injuries, and was airlifted to a hospital.
It was a terrible thing to witness, Sheridan said, and especially scary because he and his buddies had, two nights before, climbed on and camped atop the very slab that broke off. Sheridan said the rock had sounded so hollow and loose that he was afraid to hammer equipment into it or attach ropes to it.
“I was thinking, this is the worst rock I’ve seen in my life,” he said. “You could see it was peeling away from the face, and you couldn’t see how it held on.”
Nevertheless, the rockfalls won’t deter Sheridan or many other climbers in the valley.
“You can be walking down the street and be hit by a drunk driver,” he said. “That’s probably more common than (dying from) a rockfall.”
Greg Stock, the park geologist, said rockfalls like the ones this week usually happen as a result of temperature swings that cause the rock to expand and contract. He said water and ice can expand cracks and, over time, cause fissures that sometimes release in catastrophic fashion.
Stock said the sheer granite cliffs are especially susceptible in Yosemite, where 80 rockfalls are recorded a year, with countless others going unreported.
Indeed, it had rained and was cold in Yosemite when Sheridan and his friends began their climb about a week before the rockfall. He said they noticed sand pouring down the cliff as it rained. Such dust could only come from cracks behind slabs or flakes, he said.
Ken Yager, a longtime climbing guide who founded the Yosemite Climbing Association and organized the Yosemite Facelift event, said every climber worth his or her salt knows the geology of the surface on which they practice their sport.
Ironically, the height of the Yosemite climbing season in the late summer and early fall is also when rockfalls are most common, Yager said.
“This is always the time of year where I see the big ones,” Yager said. “It’s because it gets hot during the summer and then it cools off and the rock gets hot, cold and hot. That creates little fractures, and pretty soon the rock is just too heavy to stay attached to the wall and it peels away.”
Foster was the first person to die in a rockfall-related accident in Yosemite since climber Peter Terbush was killed on June 13, 1999, as he stood below Glacier Point belaying his partner on a route called Apron Jam. There have been 16 fatalities and more than 100 injuries from rockfalls in Yosemite since 1857, according to the park.
Stock said geologists could conceivably identify which rocks are the most unstable as a first step toward a prediction model. But, as with earthquakes, the system wouldn’t be foolproof.
“Just in the last decade, we have learned a whole lot about rockfalls in Yosemite, and that helps,” he said, “but we are still a long way away from predicting them.”
It’s unclear, he said, whether climate change could increase rockfalls in Yosemite, but Yager said he believes it is likely.
“Is there a chance that global warming has something to do with this? I suspect it does, because even a half degree increase in temperature can make a difference,” he said. “This year it was really hot and suddenly it got cold. It would not surprise me if that’s a potential factor.”