Death in Mount Rainier National Park: Stories of Accidents and Foolhardiness on the Northwest's Most Iconic Peak

by Tracy Salcedo

Each year almost two million visitors come to Mount Rainier National Park. If they don’t follow safety warnings, they may find themselves victims of a climbing accident, or face-to-face with a mountain lion, or stuck in the fog and snow on the Muir Snowfield, a place that is continually rated as one of America’s most dangerous hikes. Death in Mount Rainier National Park gathers some of the most dramatic stories of the more than 400 deaths that have occurred in the park’s history.

Genres: Nonfiction, Historical

270 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2018

About the author

Tracy Salcedo has written guidebooks to a number of destinations in California and Colorado. Her most current books include Historic Yosemite National Park, a book of essays describing the natural and human history of the nation's oldest park, and Hiking Through History San Francisco, which traverses the history-rich parklands around the Bay Area. Her best-selling title is Best Easy Day Hikes Lake Tahoe, now in its third edition and featuring more than 25 short, spectacular hikes around the superstar lake of the Sierra Nevada. She has also written Hiking Waterfalls in Northern California, which describes 99 waterfalls on public lands in the northern part of the state. Hiking Lassen Volcanic National Park is a favorite; Salcedo has hiked every path in California's best-kept-secret park. Other titles include Best Hikes Near Reno–Lake Tahoe, Best Hikes Near Sacramento, Best Rail-Trails California, Exploring California’s Missions and Presidios, Exploring Point Reyes National Seashore and Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and Best Easy Day Hikes guides to San Francisco’s Peninsula, San Francisco’s North Bay, San Francisco’s East Bay, San Jose, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Sacramento, Fresno, Boulder, Denver, and Aspen. She lives with her family in California’s Wine Country. You can learn more by visiting her website at www.laughingwaterink.com.

Reviews

[Ursula Johnson]

Deaths in the Mt. Rainier Region

This book was an entry in the Death in the National Parks series. I have read several of these books, most of them by the amazing Randi Minetor. Those are excellent books on the dangers of those locales. Mt. Rainier doesn't have as many entries as some of the other parks. This edition is a straight forward account of the major deaths in the park, along with some safety tips for successfully visiting the park. While interesting, this author doesn't match the storytelling abilities of Ms. Minetor. I wasn't quite glued to the book as I am with the other books. This is still a great guide for teaching how things can go wrong for any number of reasons in many different ways. National Parks may be beautiful, but they are deadly and more people die in them than the Park service cares to admit. Not to mention the number of people that go missing. The Missing 411 series is best for those stories. Still this was an interesting read.

[Sesana]

Decent entry in the subgenre, neither the best nor the worst such book I've read.

[Beth Toner]

Meh. Pretty dry—felt in many ways like a laundry list. Well-researched but not a ton of depth.

[Melissa]

I'm giving it a 3 because of the rules of rounding. It is closer to a 2.5. This is the third book in this series that I have read, and the writing was more like a textbook. I read the Yellowstone and Grand Canyon books in this series, and they are so much better written, and they seemed to keep attention even though they were at least 2 times as long. These stories felt like press clippings with no more research than that

[Lynn Alspach]

While it’s very detailed as to the events and scenery and technical aspects, it’s not very organized as to the manner of death. It seems to jump around a bit especially towards the end. Other than that, there was detailed stories or at least as much as he could given the older incidents and the records available.

[Chuckles]

This was so dry, it felt like the author was content to simply summarize official incident reports or other reporting while doing no additional research or seeking interviews or updated information. The worst book of this series I have read. A professional editor to suggest how to write the stories with a little more feeling would have been nice.