A male and female visitor to Yosemite National Park were found dead Thursday morning after an apparent fall from Taft Point.
Rangers worked through the day Thursday trying to recover the bodies, which were lying partially down the side of a steep cliff. Officials said they have not yet determined the identities of the couple or how they might have fallen.
“This is an ongoing recovery. It is tragic,” said Jamie Richards, a spokeswoman for Yosemite National Park. “Yosemite is an inherently wild place. Tragic falls do happen sometimes. What happened in this particular instance we don’t know yet.”
Taft Point has been one of Yosemite’s iconic tourist spots for more than 100 years. Located near the end of Glacier Point Road, the overlook has sweeping views to the north of Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Falls and El Capitan, and is one of the park’s favorite locations for breathtaking photos.
Named for President William Howard Taft, who visited it in 1909, the point has been a site of countless photos over the decades.
It sits roughly 3,500 feet above Yosemite Valley — a vast distance roughly two-thirds of a mile up — atop enormous granite walls that tower over the roads and hotels below.
A relatively short hiking trail from Glacier Point Road leads to Taft Point, which has a metal railing at its most popular vantage point.
Richards said that the railing is intact. Asked whether the couple may have fallen while talking a photograph or hiking on the edge of the cliffs, or whether they jumped on purpose, she said the investigation is likely to take several weeks.
“We don’t have any clear answers as to what happened,” she said. “There is going to be a very thorough investigation.”
Several park visitors noticed the bodies Wednesday evening. They alerted rangers, who determined that with darkness falling, it was too late to try and recover them from the precariously steep flanks of the cliff.
The rangers took up the recovery operation Thursday morning, Richards said, and were trying to hike up or rappel down to the bodies. If that failed, they might need to bring in a helicopter, she said.
So far this year, “more than 10” people have died at Yosemite, Richards said. Typically every year, a few dozen die or suffer life-threatening injuries, including heart attacks, car accidents, drownings or hikers or rock climbers falling from steep places, she said.
Put in context, 5 million people visit Yosemite every year.
On June 2, two experienced rock climbers, Tim Klein, 42, of Palmdale, and Jason Wells, 46, of Boulder, Colorado, fell about 1,000 feet from El Capitan, the huge granite wall on the north side of Yosemite Valley.
A month earlier, Asish Penugonda, 29, a native of India living in New York City, died after he slipped and fell from the Half Dome cables while hiking there as a thunderstorm approached. Penugonda worked as a biochemist with Siemens Healthcare, based in New Milford, N.J.
Last month, 18-year-old Tomer Frankfurter, a resident of Jerusalem, fell more than 800 feet to his death while attempting to take a photograph of himself near Nevada Fall. The young man was on a two-month trip to the United States before he planned to enter military service in Israel.
And in a high-profile incident in 2015, two men, world-famous wingsuit flier Dean Potter, and his friend Graham Hunt, died when they jumped off Taft Point and hit a rocky outcropping at 100 mph while filming themselves.
Wingsuit flying involves people wearing suits with wings sewn between their arms, body and legs. It is a form of BASE-jumping, an acronym for parachuting off buildings, antennas, spans or bridges, and earth formations such as Taft Point. BASE-jumping and wingsuit flying are illegal in Yosemite.
“No one but Potter and Hunt will every truly know what happened,” park investigators concluded in a report obtained by the Associated Press.”