An 80-year-old man whose boat flipped on the Colorado River over the weekend has become the latest fatality at Grand Canyon National Park, the fifth in less than a month and the 13th person to die there this year.
Around 3:40 p.m. Sunday, the Grand Canyon Regional Communications Center received a report that a man on a commercial river trip was receiving CPR after being thrown from his boat at Fossil Rapid in Northern Arizona, according to the National Park Service.
“Despite the efforts of the group and park rangers flown in by helicopter, all resuscitation attempts were unsuccessful,” it said.
A spokeswoman for the park was not immediately available on Tuesday to answer questions about the man’s death. His name has not been released.
The man’s death came on the same day that park officials found the body of Chenoa Nickerson, a 33-year-old hiker from Arizona who had been reported missing after a flash flood struck Havasu Canyon on Aug. 22. And it was the latest in a spate of fatalities in the canyon this summer.
In a span of seven days that ended on Aug. 6, officials recovered the body of a 20-year-old woman from New Mexico about 150 feet below the rim of the canyon after a multiday search; found the body of a man who tried to BASE jump from the South Rim of the park; and recovered the body of a North Carolina man 400 feet below the canyon’s rim after he had accidentally fallen from the edge.
In July, park officials reported three deaths in less than a month, including one that had occurred during an intense heat wave.
Grand Canyon National Park usually records around 17 deaths a year. The most common cause is cardiac arrest, according to data from the last decade.
One of the dangers that hikers face in the park is extreme summer heat. On Tuesday, temperatures in the Inner Canyon were expected to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Park officials recommended that people avoid hiking into the canyon between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to reduce heat risk.
The Grand Canyon has been a main attraction in the Southwest since President Woodrow Wilson made it a national park in 1919. Each year, hikers of varying abilities visit the park, many of them descending thousands of feet from the rim of the canyon to the Colorado River. Last year, it was the second-most-visited national park in the country, behind Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
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