Article from Christopher Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times on the dangers of dehydration —
It’s nearly noon, and the morning’s hikers scramble out of the baking inner canyon, wheezing and dripping. In a room a few hundred 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 performance 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-athlete into the Grand Canyon’s first dehydration fatality in four years.
The article details what happened.
Most people are running around pickling themselves.
I just visited the South Rim and got a kick out of all the sunburned tourists.
I’ll bet 90% of the people I saw at the GC were not fully hydrated.