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Drowning is the leading cause of death in national parks and recreation areas. It's scary how powerful water is.
Looks entirely harmless but is incredibly dangerous in some parts. Apparently the river "turns on it's side" creating a narrow but very deep stream with very fast underwater currents.
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Acquaintance did some suburban kayaking and didn't see a 3ft drop (some kind of dam or culvert under a bridge) until too late. The fluid mechanics of that drop are such that there is a vortex at the base that makes it difficult to get out. He was able to stand but just barely - scary to think how close a call that was in a pretty innocuous looking setting.
I almost drowned on a beach without surveillance, jumping into the surf waist high, for fun, until suddenly the receding water pulled me just a few meters further away and now I couldn't touch the floor anymore, and was slowly being pulled further and further away from the beach. My girlfriend of the time was on the beach far enough away that she couldn't hear or grasp that I was struggling. By luck and after perhaps…
(Let's not forget how many people die per year just by falling from a step-ladder etc.)
Do your research before getting into rivers. My local river has several gauges and hotlines you can call to get dam releases. They also have a chart of the water release amounts and if you could paddle/float/canoe/kayak etc. It even has a turbidity gauge that will show you if any harmful bacteria is present, we have issues with fertilizer runoff and e-coli. It's a rather mundane river in an area not as known as Glaci…
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...and the more we try to legislate away any possible source of danger we might encounter in our day-to-day lives, the less prepared we will be for places where nature is left to fend for itself.
The author made decisions to put herself in dangerous situations. What does that have to do with seatbelt laws or food inspection guidelines?
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that should I ever venture out into the wilderness, I would definitely not survive. I lack basic survival skills and nature would eat me alive.
That being said, I always admired folks who could go camping for days (or weeks), who could cook up a warm (and edible) meal over a campfire.
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That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as an argument. "We need to keep life more dangerous in general so that when we hit special cases it'll be easier to deal with" strikes me as generally doing more harm than good because our day to day is going to cause more harm and those special cases are always going to be special. Unless you have specific examples that you're thinking of here.
Hypothetically I'd rather my kid learn her limits by breaking her arm in the playground at age 10, than doing so in the wilderness at age 20.
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That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as an argument. "We need to keep life more dangerous in general so that when we hit special cases it'll be easier to deal with" strikes me as generally doing more harm than good because our day to day is going to cause more harm and those special cases are always going to be special. Unless you have specific examples that you're thinking of here.
I don't think he was making that argument. Someone who climbs mountains every week is less likely to be hurt in a given mountain climb than someone who doesn't but that doesn't mean that the best idea for safety is to climb mountains often.
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That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as an argument. "We need to keep life more dangerous in general so that when we hit special cases it'll be easier to deal with" strikes me as generally doing more harm than good because our day to day is going to cause more harm and those special cases are always going to be special. Unless you have specific examples that you're thinking of here.
I don't think he was making that argument. Someone who climbs mountains every week is less likely to be hurt in a given mountain climb than someone who doesn't but that doesn't mean that the best idea for safety is to climb mountains often.
On any given mountain climb, maybe. But overall? I don't know. A coworker of mine who liked mountaineering made lots of acquaintances in that lifestyle, and he told me they are often missing limbs and show lots of ugly scars, and have lots of near-death anecdotes about themselves. I'm talking about people who do this either for a living or as an all-consuming lifestyle, not casuals.
He told me of a girl, a pro mountaineer, who was missing several fingers and had plenty of teeth knocked out. Her skin looked terrible, too. And he told me this is common. Her boyfriend was also a mountaineer, because that's yet another common fact: mountaineers band together, it's difficult to be in a couple with one if you don't find that lifestyle fascinating.
Another friend who does parachuting (from airplanes) told me he knows lots of people who do BASE jumping (or even worse, those senseless "wingsuit" jumpers) and they tend to die young. They do a lot of it, always chasing a more extreme high, until one day they simply don't make it.
Drowning is the leading cause of death in national parks and recreation areas. It's scary how powerful water is.
I’ve lost friends to drowning in calm looking waters where they got trapped in hidden potholes in river bed.
Water bodies are no joke.