November 10, 2024 • 62 mins
MAC Outdoors with Mia Anstine brings you Randi Minetor, the acclaimed author of the "Death in the National Park" series. Whether you're an adventurous hiker, a nature enthusiast, or planning your next outdoor vacation, this episode shares insights you will want to experience!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
She's an award winning writer, a hunting guide, archery and rifle instructor,
keynote speaker and all around outdoors woman who encourages
you to get outside, hunt, fish, shoot and savor all that life has to
offer. And now here's your host, Mia Anstein.
Well, hey. Hi. Hello you all, thanks for tuning in. I'm
happy to be visiting with you today to share some adventures.
(00:24):
And I hope these are inspiring and not
intimidating. And that's kind of a preview peek to what we're going to be talking,
talking about. But I want to share outdoor adventures with
you. And today my guest is writing books, a
series about the national parks. And so before
we get going, I kind of wanted to just let you know, as always, there
(00:45):
are going to be links in the show notes. Also if you're watching on
YouTube, you'll be able to see some video pictures of some of the stuff we
talk about and so forth. So go ahead and tune in and subscribe over
there, but obviously not while you're driving. And I
also would like you to please let me know like message on social media
or email. The email address is contact
(01:06):
miaanstein.com let me know where you have
been and which national park is your favorite
here. I want to tell you some interesting fun facts
about the United States national parks. And so of
course Yellowstone is probably the most popular, most famous
national park that we have here in the US and it was established
(01:29):
in 1872. It's the world's first
known geothermal features like Old
Faithful. So the world's first national park that is known for
geothermal features like Old Faithful. A lot of
the parks also boast diverse wildlife, which is a
huge attraction for me. I'm always about the wildlife. Wild
(01:50):
things, flowers, bugs, birds, all of it, like it's all
good. But parks like the Everglades, they protect
rare species like the American crocodile and the Florida
panther. So maybe you can head down there. I don't know if there's, if
anyone is listening, if you've seen a panther, wow, that would
be a little hair raising, a little scary. I don't
(02:11):
know. I also want to talk about some of the size extremes.
We've got Rhett Rang Rangel. Tell me how to say
that. Somebody has got to give me a message. Wrangell St. Elias
in Alaska is the largest with over 13
million acres. And then we have Hot
Springs in Arkansas is one of the smallest national
(02:34):
parks there is. Unique
ecosystems can also be found at the parks. And the
parks vary from deserts in Death Valley which we maybe chat
about a little today to rainforest in Olympic. So you
might hear about some of that in our visit with my guest today.
And of course, we've got huge Grand Canyons. And
(02:55):
geologists are estimating that some canyon layers in some of
the parks date back 2 billion
years. 2 billion. Isn't that incredible? That's something that
when you're outside, do you ever think about how the
canyon or the river, how did it meander, how long
did it take for it to form the way that it is very
(03:18):
intriguing to somebody like me. Maybe I should have studied geology. I don't
know. I have wondered that over the years. But we've also got Mount
Denali. The largest peak in North America is located in
Denali National Park. The most visited park is the Great
Smoky Mountain and it attracts the highest number of annual
visitors. Then we have marine parks like Bisc,
(03:40):
Biscayne, and again, tell me if I'm pronouncing these right or wrong.
Guys, when you're not driving, pull over, send me an email or message me on
social media. But Biscayne and Channel Islands protect
vast amounts of marine environment. And then we have
international sites. Yes, there are international national parks
like Glacier and Waterton in Canada, and they
(04:02):
share the international Peace park
designation, cultural significance. This is something
that is local to me. Places like Mesa
Verde safeguard ancient Native American
cliff dwellings. So without further ado,
disregard my ramblings. Hopefully they make you laugh a little and
(04:23):
share a smile. And then hopefully they encourage you to get outside
and to savor all the world has to offer.
I hope you enjoy the show. Hey friends,
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(04:46):
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(05:08):
t I n e vorme.com
Miaanstein I also
wanted to suggest that maybe as a group we should try to
read some of the series of books that we're going to be chatting about today.
So if you're interested in that, go ahead and shoot me a
message, let me know and we'll together choose which one to
(05:29):
read first. And I also wanted to remind you that we
currently have a giveaway going on and this is based on the
Hunt, which was the children's book that was written by Stephanie
White. And so don't miss out. It's an exclusive giveaway.
And to get a copy of the book the Hunt, you need to subscribe
to the Mia Anstein Mac Outdoors newsletter.
(05:52):
And if you're already subscribed, shoot me an email. The email address
again is contact miaanstein.com and
tell me what was your favorite part of
the episode number 150, which was with
author Stephanie White, where she talks about her other books
and the book the Hunt. And we'll be giving away a copy
(06:15):
of that book. So without further
ado, I hope you'll go over and enter that as well as let
me know which book you want to read first out of the series
of the Death in the National Parks.
This summer, whether at the range or in the field, WSI Sports
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(06:38):
covered. Visit wsisports.com to support the show and
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WSI is bringing back pride in America made clothing.
Again, that code is MACO10 for 10%.
Off your order@WSISports.com
(07:01):
all right, everybody, I'm happy to have you listening to
the show today and I'm excited to learn because I've
been touring some national parks and an author reached
out to me that has a very interesting series and I wanted
to share that with you while I learn about it as well.
So Randi, would you mind introducing yourself to my guests and
(07:23):
letting them know who you are and what you do? Sure. My name
is Randi Minetor. I am the author of seven books
in the Death in the national park series.
Not Yellowstone or Yosemite, those were other people, but most
of the other ones. And I'm a
professional author who specializes in the national parks
(07:45):
and nature. So when you had mentioned the national parks
and you said that I too was looking at mat national parks.
Last year for spring break, my daughter and I kind of took a tour through
Arizona. We always do whirlwind tours, but we did
go to a couple national parks down there and we had
just looked for points of interest along the way way. And
(08:08):
what I'm curious about is kind of how you came to
want to tour national parks, but also how the
books came to be sure. In
1992, my husband and I did a a
honeymoon road trip. I had never been out west
at all. So he we flew to Minneapolis where his
(08:30):
parents live, rented A car and drove through the
Badlands and Mount Rushmore, around
to Yellowstone, through the Black Hills,
into Grand Tetons, and then on the way came back
home. It was the first I had seen the Rocky Mountains.
And I just fell in love with the whole thing.
(08:52):
And over the course of my career, at that point, I was, I
was working at an advertising agency and
really the course of my career began, became how can
I subsidize this need to see all of the national
parks and all of the affiliates and so on
throughout the national park system? So
(09:15):
I managed to swing a deal with
my publisher, the Globe Pequot Press, to start writing about the
national parks. And happily, that has funded
our travels and our interest
in continuing to plan trips that get us to all of the national
parks. Outstanding.
(09:37):
And when you're doing this, I'm just, I have
so many questions. I always do that go through my head. But how
did you choose your very first national park? I mean,
what was the specific one that you first went to and then how did it
develop from there? Well, it was, you know, going, going
in order along. I 90 essentially was. The
(09:59):
Badlands was the first, the first one for me. And
I, I, you know, in the beginning, I really didn't get
it. Like, what, what is this? Why are they protecting this?
What, what am I supposed to do here? And
once I caught on, and with my husband's help, because he and his
parents did road trips through throughout his childhood and
(10:21):
adolescence, they went everywhere in the country. So he, he
knew what to do. And a few times said to me, get out of the
car. You know, you need to. Let's
go do a hike. Let's go see this beautiful
place. And then I finally caught on to what, what the
parks were about. So as we advanced, you know,
(10:43):
through Mount Rushmore and Black Hills and so
on, I started to understand that the National
Park Service protects the most beautiful places in the
country for our enjoyment. I mean, it's a. It's purely
altruistic and incredible. So by the time we got
to Yellowstone, I, I could, could
(11:05):
hardly contain my excitement. You know, an elk stuck its head right
into our car. We saw bears, you know, all sorts
of animals and birds, and it was just, it was just
joyous. So I got completely hooked.
Completely hooked. That's, I mean, that's something that hooks, I think most people because
we all have such a fascination with wild an. And wild things.
(11:28):
When you have started the series of the books,
which book was the first book? I mean, because I have like the list of
the seven books. And I know, like, which ones I want to read, but do
I need to read them in a particular order? No, not at all.
My. My first one was Death in Glacier national park,
(11:48):
which was essentially an assignment from Lions Press.
My agent walked me up to an editor at a book expo
and said, they're
about to expand the Death series
they had. Actually, the only one they had at that point at
Lyons was Death in Yellowstone, written by the extraordinary
(12:11):
Lee Whittlesey. And it had sold like mad. So
with the centennial of the Park Service coming up in
2016, it sort of dawned on them that, gee,
maybe, maybe we could do more of these. So I was
assigned Death in Glacier National Park. And I had been to
Glacier a few years before, so I at least knew what the.
(12:33):
What the terrain was and, and gotten a feeling
for how truly dangerous it is if you're not
behaving yourself, if you're not following the basic rules of being
outdoors. And when
I started to delve into it, that park had just completed
a list of the two hundred and sixty four
(12:55):
deaths that had taken place since it was declared a park.
And so I had that to start with.
And I was able to start doing research, really, through
mostly newspapers, you know, mostly
news reports of these, of these
events and to get an idea of why people,
(13:19):
you know, two or three people a year in the country,
why they die in national parks. So
it's a fascinating subject. I mean, the real
thing that you realize is that people
make the same mistakes over and over. You
see them making that error of not understanding the
(13:43):
terrain, not doing the research, you know, not.
Not paying attention to what the rangers are telling them and to all the
warning signs. Marching off into the wilderness
with, you know, nothing but a bottle of water and a granola
bar. Things like this that,
you know, unfortunately end in people's deaths.
(14:05):
So. And the more I have explored that
through Zion, Death in Zion, Death in
Rocky Mountain National Park, Death in the Everglades, the
more I see the same kinds of errors over and
over. So when we're looking at the
errors, I mean, I teach hunter education, so we teach survival through
(14:26):
that. Do most people just not have the knowledge
because they haven't been out there? I mean, they're inexperienced and maybe they're not looking
up the tips from the park. Well, you know, a lot of what
we see is that people are out of their element, you know, that
they're, they're used to what they experience at home.
So a couple of skiers from Minnesota
(14:49):
have no real way to understand what the
backcountry in Rocky Mountain national park is going to be like. They come from
the plains. You know, there might be a few hills that they ski, that
they ski on in maybe Wisconsin, but then they get
down there and they really don't, don't
understand the, the enormity of the
(15:11):
terrain. For starters, the, the,
the altitude and how that's going to affect them and how,
how much more tired they're going to be. They also
may expect in one particular instance I have in mind that
this couple also expected that when they got to a
(15:31):
shelter that they knew was there, they expected it to be stocked
with food and water and firewood. And of course it was just
a lean to. So there was none of that. There was no way to get
warm. They hadn't brought any supplies with them.
And this unfortunately led to exposure which led to
hypothermia and so on. And unfortunately they
(15:53):
died. These are the kinds of things that we, that
we see a lot of that people just not understanding
what they're getting into and how the skills they use at home to
walk a trail are not going to work. And at
12,000ft in the Rocky Mountains. Yeah, it's
with the book series. Is it more of let's read an
(16:16):
adventure and hear about these hair raising
tales or are you guys striving to educate
outdoors people who maybe we don't want them to be making
these mistakes. There's, there's both. You know, you read
the tales and, and you know,
I've, I've done my best to make them interesting. They're not
(16:37):
sensationalized. I'm really, I'm a journalist so I'm really trying
to just report the facts. And unfortunately I can't
interview these people because they're dead. So
that's kind of a, kind of a, an obstacle
to being able to truly tell the whole story.
But yeah, there's quite a bit of, you
(17:00):
know, telling, telling what happened to these people. But
there's also a section in the back of every book that is how to stay
alive in this park. Okay. So that,
yeah, so that, you know, there's all the things about carrying the 10
essentials, which I'm me, I'm sure you know very, very well.
You know, food, water, extra clothing, shelter,
(17:23):
compass or some way to navigate. I was very excited. I just
got my iPhone 16 and it's a satellite phone.
That was very exciting that. Okay. You know, people can
communicate now even if they're lost in the, in the back
country. Yeah. And that's something that I've seen is people
who haven't been to areas where there's not cell service,
(17:46):
they think, well, I have my phone, I'm fine. And then they get into the
mountains and it's like, you might have to hike straight up for two
hours to get a signal. And they don't understand that or know that
they could do that. And so to have that capability with your
phone is just. That is a phenomenal progress
in technology. Yes. Yeah, it absolutely is. And
(18:08):
that is one of the things that we discover.
There's a group of people, seven
canyoneers in Zion national park, who,
unfortunately for lack of cell service in the park, did
not get the warning of the flash flood that was just about
to come through and drowned all seven of them in a
(18:30):
canyon. These are the kinds of things that I know,
you know, people rail against the idea of putting up a cell
tower in the middle of a national park,
but the truth is, cell service would save lives. And
right now, for a lot of the parks and a lot of the backcountry, we
don't have that. So having a sat phone in your pocket
(18:51):
is a real. That's a terrific advance,
and I'm sure it's going to save lives out there.
Yeah, I imagine that it certainly will. Just because of
that communication aspect. When I was
kind of researching and looking up all your books, you have a lot
of other books you've written as well, and you mentioned just now that you're a
(19:14):
journalist in the books. Is it
built to be entertaining to the reader? I mean, because the first thing that
I thought of, because I grew up out in a rural area. I mean, I
grew up in the mountains, so things that I think are common sense are probably
not common, but I kind of thought of dumb
ways to die. And do you kind of write
(19:36):
it that way, or is it just strictly news? And I'm a journalist and
I'm just reporting what has happened. What. What type of a read am I looking
at? I'm it. I'm kind of straddling
the two worlds of journalism and, for
lack of a better word, novel writing. I do want to write a
good story, so I do my best to do that with
(19:58):
the information that I have. Some of them, I have a great
deal more detail because they've been written about.
You know, a lot of people are curious about what could have happened in a
particular situation. The one that comes to mind in
Glacier is the night of The Grizzlies in 1967,
when two different grizzly bears in the
(20:21):
same park, 20 miles apart, attacked
two young girls who were camping and ate them.
Two separate bears had never happened before, but
these, you know, in. In two instances in the same
night, and there was tremendous speculation of
what could have made this happen. And, you know,
(20:44):
the, the end result is it was pure coincidence,
but there's a tremendous amount that has been written about that
event. So I was able to draw from
that and tell a very compelling story.
Sometimes, sometimes there's a lot of information, sometimes there's
nothing. You know, there's. There's a couple of guys
(21:06):
who disappeared in the 1920s that, you
know, there's a picture of them waving and smiling at 1 o'clock,
and by 3 o'clock they had completely vanished and they were never
seen, never seen again. Nobody ever was able to solve
that. And unfortunately, I didn't have access to the records of what
the search was like. So it's a short story.
(21:27):
Wow. Yeah. When I, when there's more
information, it's, you know, available. And I
do. I dig through a lot of different kinds of information.
Unfortunately, the parks themselves are not that interested in helping
me. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I
had the best luck in Acadia national park, where the staff was
(21:50):
very accommodating and said, you. You have a right to this
information. I've also had parks that completely
ignored me and refused to give me anything, even
with foia. FOIA requests
that I just. Just not able to pull anything.
There were a couple of investigations that supposedly the
(22:12):
FBI conducted, and when I foiled the
FBI, they said there were no files. So
it's very hard to know, you know, what, what
really went on in some of these cases. And, you
know, if it were, was there truly no investigation? I did
nobody do anything about this. So I, you know,
(22:35):
I do the best I can essentially, with what I have. But
the parks, it's interesting that they don't want to
talk about death in their parks, but they sure do want to sell these
books. And that's interesting to me because part
of some of the places we went, when we went on our little tour,
it's because of the ghost. We did a ghost town tour like the
(22:58):
Loop down in Arizona. And because that's something that's
an attraction for certain tourists. I mean, I say that
because my daughter picked our route and I mean, I enjoyed the
trip too, but I know there's people that specifically would probably go to the park
just for that. And then there's also probably people that would
be frightened and not want to go, like don't want to go outdoors because
(23:21):
they're afraid something's going to happen. They're going to. Eaten by a grizzly bear or
something like that. Right? Yeah. So I can kind
of see both sides of that with, with the National Park Service,
with the nps. And that was going to be one of my questions was how
they're working with you on it. And so some are, some aren't, but
they are selling the book. Oh, yes. Yeah, these
(23:42):
books. I, I actually just got my royalty statement
today on, on for all of my books
with, with this publisher. And yeah, these, these
books sell quite nicely. So I'm, I'm happy
that the park is benefiting from, from the work I've
done and I'm hoping that when I go back, you know,
(24:04):
it's, it's eight years since I wrote Death and Glacier, so in two
years it'll be 10. And usually we do a.
After 10 years. So I'm, I'm hoping that when I
go back to Glacier that they'll be more accommodating
the second time around. Yeah, hopefully. And with each park.
Have you, you've already been to each one before you write
(24:27):
the series, the book in the series? Yes, I, I do my
best to do that in all of these. I have been to the
parks and I, you know,
as, as part of the, part of the research,
it's important to know what the terrain is like. I'm not going to pretend
that I, that I hiked up Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain, which
(24:49):
is a 14, 000 foot mountain. That's, that's
just not within my ability these days.
But I certainly have researched pretty carefully and I, I did
speak to rangers and volunteers there who had done
it to better understand what the obstacles are and
why. Why 75 people have died on that mountain.
(25:13):
That's a, that's an extraordinary number of people.
So it was important to really understand what
that was like. Yeah. Every once in a while I'll get a letter
from somebody or an email from somebody saying, you know, this was a right turn,
not a left turn, and I note that and I'll, I'll, you
know, take that into consideration next time around. But.
(25:35):
Okay, yeah, probably don't need to get too
caught up in the weeds when we're reading a book. But then also it's nice
if they're letting you know. And hopefully if people are letting you know, they're being
courteous about it too, because it sounds to me like you're just trying to help
somebody who wants to go to these places and also tell the
story. I mean, that's something that needs to be documented when
(25:57):
you're telling the story and you talked about maybe there was no police
investigation somewhere, are you kind of putting
theories or hypotheses in there during those moments where there's
nothing? No, I'm really not. I, I
am not personally.
What's the word I want. I don't, I don't have the experience, the,
(26:21):
the search and rescue experience to be able to, to guess what
went wrong. I. But I will interview people who
do know those things and, you know, allow them
to, to say what the educated guess really is.
You know, some of them, it's quite obvious what went wrong,
but some of them, you know, when you have a very
(26:43):
experienced hiker or climber or
canyoneer who gets into some trouble
in a place, then it, you really, you know, you're,
you're getting into where is the equipment
failure or, you know, what, what wrong move did
he make or, you know, did the boulder come out from under his foot or,
(27:06):
you know, what, what happened there. There really no way to know.
What we do know is that he fell 200ft to his death.
So. But people who, who actually do
those kinds of sports are more than willing to
talk to me about what they think went wrong. So there's quite a bit
of that. Yeah. In, in your research, you're kind of
(27:29):
interviewing some of them as well. Somebody who maybe was a rock
climber or something. Yes, yeah, yeah, I
do some of that. I have, you know, spoken to search and rescue
people and to rangers. Certainly the
unfortunate thing is that, that when there's an
accident and one person dies and the other one survives,
(27:51):
the survivor is, is really not willing to talk to
me. They don't want to talk about this ever again. So
I've had a lot of people turn me down for interviews, and that's, that's,
that's fine. That's totally understandable that they don't want to relive this
for what they may interpret as me trying to profit
from their experience. That's not,
(28:14):
you know, that's just not what I, what I,
I don't, I don't want to upset anybody,
you know, by doing this. Right. And I,
I mentioned thinking about dumb ways to die, and that is
not what you're trying to do. You're not trying to capitalize on something like
that. When we're looking at the way people die,
(28:36):
what's the number one way that people are dying in national
parks? It's different for each park. Oddly
enough, in Glacier, it's drowning. You would think it would
be falling off of things. And there's a lot of that and there's
avalanches and so on. But mostly what we see
are people who do not understand that the lakes
(28:59):
and rivers and what they call creeks, that to me
are raging rivers in Glacier are fed
by melting glaciers. So that water
is just above freezing. You're talking about
34 degrees. You go into that water, in a minute and a half, you're
dead. So there are a lot of those.
(29:22):
There's people, kids skipping across a creek,
what's going called a creek on rocks. But the creek is this
rushing thing and they get, they slip, they get
pulled into the river and in, you know, just a couple of minutes,
they're gone. Wow. So there's a, there's a lot
of that. A lot. Also a lot of lakes, people thinking they're going to take
(29:44):
a swim by jumping off a boat, you know, and, and
discovering that Lake McDonald is just freezing
cold and very deep. So we do
see a lot of that
in other parks. Like in Rocky Mountain, the biggest thing is mountain
climbing and
(30:05):
having a fall or getting injured and being stuck at
the top of a mountain or being struck by
lightning is something we see a lot of in Rocky Mountain as
well. Wow. But each, each park has a different,
A different hazard. A different hazard, and lightning is
one. Like, what is the percentage of people that are killed by lightning? It's
(30:28):
very small, but if you're gonna hike that 14 or
your chances increase, well, that's it.
That high up in Rocky Mountain
national park, there's a lightning storm almost every
day, at least in, not so much in the winter, but
spring, summer, fall, every day there's a lightning storm
(30:50):
and it's predictable. So when you're hiking Long's
Peak, they want you to start well before
noon or well before sunup so that you're
nearing the top of the park or the, I'm sorry, the top of
the mountain by late morning
at the latest. Because by 2 or 3 o'clock we're going to
(31:12):
have a lightning storm. So. And you don't want to be
up there to be hit by lightning. You. You become the tallest thing in the
park just by standing there. So, so that's
something that, that's very well publicized. If you're
going to hike Long's Peak, that you got to start early, you got to be
off the mountain by like mid afternoon to avoid that.
(31:34):
Well, a lot of people think that's Nonsense.
So they, you know, so they go ahead and they, they
start, you know, 9:00 in the morning and they get up there and it's two
in the afternoon and the next thing they know there's a
bolt of lightning and they suddenly realize what they've done.
So, and getting down from the mountain quickly at that point
(31:57):
may, may not even be an option. So, so
that's a, that's a thing that happens there. That's one of the big
ones. And so I know a lot of my listeners love to be
outdoors. A lot of them are hunters and some, some of them
don't hunt or get outdoors very much at all.
But I think almost everybody that listens loves wildlife.
(32:18):
And to whoever's listening to the show, if you want to correct me, please
do. I'm always happy to hear from the listeners. But
when you were talking about the grizzlies, is there very much
conflict with the, with the wildlife? I mean, is that a top cause
of death or no? Is it a small amount? It's not a top
cause by any stretch. Grizzly
(32:41):
attacks are very few and far between.
What happened in 1967 has a lot to do
with a policy at Glacier and Yellowstone national
parks at the time that they had these huge garbage dumps
that everybody would just come and, and dump their trash into
and there's, you know, the food they didn't eat and so on. And they set
(33:03):
up bleachers so people would come and sit and watch the
grizzly bears come into these dumps and chow down.
This, this is like mind boggling when you think about
today's National Park Service. That kind of thing would never happen.
So after these two, these two young
women died from bear attacks on the same night,
(33:26):
they shut down all of these dumps and realized that they
had habituated all of these animals to
being around humans and seeing humans as a source of food.
So that practice ended. And then there was a period of all of
those bears that had been habituated to eating at the
(33:47):
dumps every night started to die because they didn't know how to
eat, how to eat any other way. So
this was a pretty dark period for the park Service.
But since then there's there, that's where the, the
bear proof containers come from and the bear proof trash cans and all
of the things that we see now that protect
(34:09):
people and protect the bears from becoming habituated to
people. So there are very few bear attacks at
this point and every time there is one, it makes world news.
So, you know, if you've heard about it. That's all there is.
Other animals generally. Well, the big thing is the
buffalo in Yellowstone that people think
(34:32):
are fluffy cows and think are
domesticated and walk up to the buffalo gores
them. You know that that's
more about human foolishness than it is about the
animal being dangerous. You keep your distance. The buffalo are just
fine. They're not, they're not coming after you.
(34:54):
So you know, there isn't there. Beyond that there aren't
a lot of animal attacks. You don't hear about people being attacked by
deer or elk. There was one
mountain goat and I think it was Olympic, which I
haven't written about yet, where
this mountain goat just gored a guy on a trail.
(35:16):
But that, that was really an individual case.
So. Oh the, you know, the animals are minding their own business and we
should do the same. You just mentioned Olympic
maybe being next on your list. Do you
have a list going like what your next projects are going to be or
is it as that you're publishers are saying which one
(35:38):
you need to do? Well, sometimes they come up with them.
But my editor right now is, is very
willing to hear what my ideas are. And in all honesty,
the. One of the more deadly parks that I haven't
written about yet is Death Valley, mostly
because of heat. So you know, that's a,
(36:00):
that's a very different story from the mountainous parks. So
I'm hoping to do that. It's, it feels like a no
brainer, you know that we should be writing about the park with
death in its name. So,
so I'm hoping that, that, that will be the next one. But we'll talk
about that early next year. Yeah. And have you already gone to Death
(36:22):
Valley or you're going to be at it? You've already been there?
Yes. And yeah, it's, it's big and
flat with, and ringed with mountains. So that
the, the amazing thing about Death Valley is that you can be in
the lowest point in the United States
altitude wise, you know, at Badwater Basin and
(36:44):
looking up at the highest, one of the highest points in
California from there. So yeah, it's a,
it's a really remarkable and beautiful place
but, but really idiosyncratic in terms of how
you can get yourself killed there. When
you're thinking of doing that. What would be the
(37:06):
best time of year? I mean I'm thinking of when I would go there. But
for overall, is each park a different time of year when we should
go or is there a tourist season? Because that's when you should
be there. And how do you kind of decide what time of year you're going
to be at a certain place? Well, people tend to travel in the
summer because they have the time and their kids are off from school
(37:27):
and all those good things. But though the summer is often not the best
time to go to a park, some of them have become so overrun
with tourists that in the summer that they've had to
institute shuttle buses or, you know, timed
entry or, or things like that. So
particularly the Southern parks, really,
(37:51):
October to April is the better time
to go. I'm thinking Death Valley, Big
Bend, saguaro in Arizona and organ pipe
cactus in Arizona. They're going to be beastly hot in the
summer. But we were in Death Valley in
March and it was in bloom, which was really
(38:14):
something to see. And it, it was
about 80 degrees. It was really quite lovely. And very
much the, what you, what you would hope for in
going to a national park. You know, some of
the, the northern parks you really do have to go in the
summer. Glacier in particular, the,
(38:35):
the, the amazing going to the Sun Road is only
open from July to maybe the middle of
September when it starts snowing again. So you
really have to go there in the summer to get the full, the full impact.
Someplace like Yellowstone or Yosemite has something to
offer all the whole year. So anytime you want to
(38:57):
go, you're going to see something special. Yeah, Yellowstone,
I think we can rent snowmobiles and you can kind of do different stuff like
that. And there's trails that they keep open on the north
end, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. And they have
the snow coaches also to take you through. And yeah,
it's one of my dreams is Yellowstone in the middle of
(39:20):
winter. We'll get there eventually. We
ended up in Yellowstone inadvertently in the middle of winter one year,
because GPS maps and that's a totally
different thing, like the trouble that the maps caused. Somebody could write books
about that. But our map took us
to the bottom of Yellowstone and it was taking
(39:42):
us to a hotel north of Yellowstone in December. And it's like the road is
not open. Oh, wow. We didn't, we didn't really pay attention to
it till we were like, wait a second. We ended up staying in the south
end and it was really fun. We got to see a lot of wildlife and
stuff like that. But it just made me giggle because sometimes we
depend a little too much on that technology. Yes.
(40:04):
Yeah. And that's, that's a trap as well, especially if it gives
out on you in the middle of something. So. Yeah, that's important,
definitely. So when you've been out at
parks, have you ever had anything that has been challenging to
you? Have you had any experiences out there that you thought were kind of frightening?
Oh, sure. In particular, there is a hike
(40:27):
in Big Bend national park, which is at the very bottom of Texas.
This, that there's. There's a bird
there, that it's the only place in the United
States that you can see it. It's called the Colima warbler. And I'm a huge
birder. My husband is a bird photographer. So
we, we undertook this,
(40:50):
this hike up from 5,400ft
to 6,800ft to find this bird.
And we did everything wrong. I mean, it's. It's incredible
to me now how foolish we were on this hike. We.
We each took a gallon of water with us, so we thought we had enough
water. We did not. We ran out of water before we got to the
(41:12):
top. We. So it was three hours back
down with no water. We had, you know, sweet and salty
snacks with us that we didn't eat because we weren't hungry because of the
heat. It was 100 degrees. I mean,
everything we did was wrong. And the worst of it is we saw the bird,
but we didn't even. We were so delirious by the time we saw the bird
(41:34):
that we didn't even think to take a picture of it.
So, wow, we put ourselves through this thing
and somewhere, you know, this was the first time,
somewhere along the way that I ever thought I could die
here. I mean, this could be bad.
And luckily it wasn't that long a hike and, you know,
(41:57):
we got back, but it took. It took me a good week to
recover, to get my electrolytes balanced again,
to be able to think clearly. It was. It was very scary.
I. This, this was when I learned that dehydration
can take you very, very fast. Right. That it's not, you
know, it's not three days without water. It could be a few hours before
(42:20):
you really. Your head starts to swim. Yeah. And that's something I think people don't
understand is the three days without water is if you're uncomfortable,
not if you're in high heat or high altitude or super cold
conditions. Because if you're just at a comfortable climate zone, you.
You can go longer. But something like that is very
hard on your body and depletes your nutrients really quickly.
(42:43):
Yes, it sure does. Yeah. And when you're looking at all this,
the studying, you're doing in the research and you're learning about the different ways
people die, what, what do you think is one of the scariest ones? I mean,
I think of hypothermia, heat
exhaustion, stuff like that. It's. To me, that's not
frightening. I mean, it's terrible and it's tragic and probably pretty
(43:05):
ugly. But is there anything that's super creepy or
scary that you've heard about?
Boy, that's a, that's an interesting question. Maybe
just the people who went missing and have never been seen. Well, probably
because heaven only knows where they are or what happened to them.
And that, that is something, you know, some. That's a,
(43:28):
that's a whole different topic about people who just vanish without
a trace. But one thing that
I, that I can't imagine the terror of is
an avalanche. And that's on,
on Mount Washington that I did a book about, even though that's a
state park. But it's the, the highest,
(43:51):
the highest mountain in. I want to say. Yeah,
well, at least in New Hampshire, it might be in New England and
avalanches are very common. And I can't imagine
just seeing that wall of snow coming
at you and being buried alive. I mean, that to me
(44:11):
is the ultimate terror. There's a story about
five young men in Glacier who decided
to try to set a record for winter climbing
a particular mountain on New Year's
Day. And they hid an avalanche and they were all wiped
out. So, but that's, that's the
(44:34):
thing, that whole buried alive concept and knowing
what to do and what not to do to try to get yourself out.
That's. That's one of the things I put in both of those books of what
to do if you're buried in an avalanche. And it's. You. It.
Depending on the weight of what's on top of you, you can
survive. But it, but you have to know what you're
(44:56):
doing. And most of the very experienced mountain climbers do know what
they're supposed to do, but some do not. And
it's very often the last guy in the line that
is buried without, without recourse.
That's. That, that is probably the scariest thing too.
(45:17):
I used to snowmobile a lot and that was something that we always
worried about. And some of the, some of our friends, they'd be like, oh, it's
not going to happen. And you'd watch slabs of snow break free
and it's like, it definitely could happen. Oh, yeah,
absolutely. Yeah. And the thing is that, that the
parks know when there's danger of avalanche. And they
(45:38):
have a rating system and it's, it's in the visitor center.
So stopping first to make sure.
Or calling the hotline, they have hotlines for this or,
you know, looking it up on the website to make sure that you're going
on a day when. When there's a low risk of avalanche.
That's very important. So there are
(46:00):
safeguards in place, but it's all about,
you know, making sure that you take advantage of all of these things
that are out there to help you be safe. And if a ranger tells
you, don't go today, don't go today, you know, it's
that simple. When I give presentations about this, I
talk about the false urgency of limited time.
(46:24):
That idea that I'm only going to be in this park for two
days. I'm, you know, I may never come back here. I'd
better do this. Even though they're saying it's not a good day for it, I'm
going to do it anyway. And that's
unfortunately how you end up dead. So,
you know, that's my. What I, what I say to people is,
(46:45):
what if you don't go, you'll be disappointed, but you'll be
alive. You know, if a ranger's telling
you no, don't do it,
that sounds like. Good advice to me. And I'm just kind of
reflecting because I've been in places that I shouldn't have been.
And it's like hindsight. It's like, why? And because the time
(47:07):
thing, just what you're saying, you know, it's.
Yeah, we could all probably reflect on that. Hopefully people listening are probably thinking
of moments that they've had, maybe on boats without
life jackets. And I'm just saying that because I was on one
where the, the person who owned the boat was like, wait a second, I only
have this many. Like, one of them had. Somebody had either taken or
(47:29):
it wasn't there. And so it was like, okay, well, it's okay. We'll go
anyway. Nothing will happen. But what if something did happen?
That's it. That's how we get these stories, is by that kind of an
attitude. And I definitely, as I said, I'm using my
own example because I'm guilty of, like, yeah, let's just go ahead. It's all right.
So. Right. Exactly. Exactly. There's.
(47:51):
There's one, one story that
is easy to laugh at, but there is
a man in glacier who was taking pictures of
a grizzly that was advancing on him, and he kept taking
the Pictures. And he kept taking the pictures. And the
grizzly is coming right at him. And the last
(48:13):
picture is, of course, the big grizzly with his
paws in the air. And it's like a perfect
documentation of his own death. Wow.
Yeah. Just. How can you possibly
not drop the camera and climb a tree at that point? But
he didn't. He just kept shooting. Wow. That. That
(48:36):
one's kind of like. That takes my breath away. Because I. As I'm. I'm
an outdoor writer, too, and it's like, you have to have pictures for your
articles, but I can't really see myself doing that.
No, I actually. I'm guilty of articles that
I've written that I don't have images for. You know, and it's like, I'm calling
friends, can I buy a picture? Because I need a. You know, you need an
(48:56):
image. But that one's. I can see how
people would do that just for a social media post. I mean, we talked about
the buffalo. We've seen stuff about that. So
that's terrible. Yeah. And selfies are
definitely, you know, not so much in most of the parks that I've
written about. But as time
(49:18):
goes on, you hear more and more stories about people.
Particularly for me, it was Acadia national
park of people standing
out on rocks on the rocky coast of Maine,
taking selfies of themselves with the big waves coming over from a
hurricane that had taken place further south.
(49:41):
And just a way of just grabbing them and
taking them right into the ocean. You know, just the.
The total lack of realization of what a dangerous position
they put themselves in to take a picture.
Yeah. You know, nobody wants to see a selfie of a dead person.
No. That's for sure. Right. And I'm
(50:03):
laughing, but I shouldn't be laughing. That's the truth that, you know, we don't want
to see that. And so thinking of pictures
and whatnot, you're writing these books and you're going on the adventures.
Can you tell us a little bit about the photography in the books?
Well, actually, these books don't have any photography. Okay.
Except on the covers. Most of the
(50:26):
covers were shot by my husband, who photographer Nick Minetor, who
has done the photography for all of our hiking
books and our birding books. So there's plenty
of that. And, you know, most of most of the hiking and so
on that we do is here in New York State, where I
live. We have done quite a number of
(50:48):
books. Hiking waterfalls, hiking through history, hiking the lower
Hudson Valley, hiking the Catskills. You know, all of
These kinds of things. So, so there's a lot of photography
there, but most of our national
park photography ends up on our,
on our Facebook pages and in our social media.
(51:11):
Okay, so far. Well, it's neat
that you have somebody to pal around with and go on adventures
with. I think that's super, super nice to have somebody to do that
with. What is something that you would give someone as a tip?
Tip for going to see national parks? What's your number one
tip? Oh, wow.
(51:34):
You know, it's, it's the tip that, that Nick gave me
back in 1992. Get out of the car. Oh,
that's a good one. Well, most, you see people
all over, all the time,
just, you know, seeing the entire national park through the
windshield. So I have actually memories that are like
(51:56):
a letter box, you know, that the top and the bottom are cut
off because I'm just looking at it through the windshield. Get out of the car.
Take a hike. You know, find a trail that's right
for your skill level, whatever it is. There are easy trails, there are
harder trails. You know, get out into the
wilderness, have an interaction with
(52:18):
nature, maybe see some animals. One of my
favorite moments was when we were hiking in Great Smoky Mountain
national park and two little kids suddenly came running up to
us and yelled, do you want to see a really big spider?
We said, of course we do. So they brought us over
to where their parents were guarding this, this really quite
(52:42):
enormous spider that was on the side of a tree.
It was, it was impressive, but they were so excited.
And that's, that's the thing. You're not going to have an experience
like that sitting in the front seat of your car. You got to get
out and really see what you're, what you're
there to see. And the other thing is I've seen
(53:04):
people stop at pull offs
and rush out with their camera already in
hand with their phone, actually these days and just, just, you
know, do a panorama of
what they're looking at and then just get back in the car and
never stop for two minutes to look at the
(53:26):
view. So thinking, oh, look at it at home,
like, but you're here and it's real. Yeah. And I
would, I would reiterate that as a tip, is that the
pictures never, even if it's the world's greatest photographer, the
pictures never do it justice as what you see when you're there.
And so if you stop and just take a breath and relax for a minute,
(53:48):
it also is great for your health. I mean, just to kind of Connect with
it even. I mean, you're not touching maybe the view, but you're connecting with it
by being there. So I think that's a really good tip. Yeah, that's. That's
exactly it. You know, have the experience, not
through a lens, but have it yourself. And
it makes. It makes a huge difference.
(54:10):
Absolutely. And so we keep talking about these, all your books,
and I. What I'm thinking is I used to do a book club and then
I've been too busy and haven't been doing very good with my book club.
But I'm thinking of maybe challenging my readers to read a few
of these books. Can you tell us where we find them and
then in what order should we read them? If that matters at all?
(54:32):
Yeah, the order is not that important. But that
being said, Death in Glacier and Death in Rocky Mountain are probably
the meatier ones because there's
so many incidents there to talk about. But the books
are available on Amazon and every
other online book retailer. Whatever, whatever your favorite one
(54:54):
is, you can find them there. If you just, you
know, want to Google my name, it'll take you to my Amazon author
page, which will. Where you can
see all of the books I've written that are available. So
that would be probably the easiest way. You can also order them
from your local bookstore.
(55:17):
Excellent. That's great. And then
we can follow you on social media. I'll include some
links to your. To your contacts and stuff in the show
notes. I always try to put those down there. Are there any other
things that you like to mention before I let you go?
Well, I do. I am starting an email newsletter, so
(55:39):
if you go to my website, you'll be able to sign up for that.
And. No, I mean, other than that, I think
we. We've really covered it pretty nicely. Mia, I really appreciate you
taking the time to delve into this topic. Well, I mean
it. To me, death isn't something that's fun to talk
about. And that's very much why I was curious what
(56:02):
angle the books are taking. And
journalistic, I think, is probably good and more
for reporting rather than entertaining. And
obviously you have to entertain to keep people reading. Yes, but there's
all different styles of books. And I was going to ask you about the publishing,
but you answered that immediately, right away. So we already understood
(56:24):
that. And I think it's important for my listeners to understand that
because I think a lot of people, I have people, they're like, oh, you're a
writer. Like, that's boring. Like, you don't do Anything. And it's
like, it's hard work. Yes, yes, yes.
And you're doing a bunch of research and traveling, so I'm sure you get to
have some fun adventures on along the way. What, what's your favorite park
(56:45):
you've been to so far? Boy, you know, it is so
hard to answer that and usually it's whichever one we've just
left. But I have a personal love of
Zion national park,
where. Because when you go into
Zion, you go in at the bottom of the canyon rather than at the
(57:06):
top like at the Grand Canyon. So you have this
essentially 2000 foot vermillion
hug around you. It's a
bright, bright, brilliant orange
area and with all the rock
formations and the Virgin river running through there and
(57:27):
the fact that you can walk up the Virgin river for three
miles and see slot canyons, which are
really unique to Utah and Arizona
and something you really need to experience. It's just, just
a beautiful, beautiful place. The hiking is not that
difficult. You can, you can make it difficult. You can do
(57:49):
canyoneering and climb up the 2,000 foot canyons, but it's not
necessary. You can have a wonderful time there.
Absolutely. And thinking of that, I know it's probably
been five or six years ago, time flies. But, but there was an
issue in Zion with graffiti. Do you have any, I
don't even know if you advice, but any instructions to people when they're going to
(58:11):
these places and how they should respect the places? Oh, absolutely.
Leave them as you found them. There's no reason to mar
a national park. There's nothing to be
gained from that. You don't need to carve your initials into things.
Just take pictures. You know the, that old,
old adage, you know, take nothing but, but pictures,
(58:35):
leave nothing but footprints. It's. There are
beautiful places and you want to leave them exactly as they are for the
next person to enjoy. And you want to be able to come back and bring
your children and your children's children to these
parks. Exactly. That's, yeah, super
important. And I mean that goes for. Even if you're not in a national
(58:56):
park, but in, in the national park, the, the nps,
National Park Service. Is there any tips on how
to. I'm imagining you must have an annual pass. Do you have any
tips or advice for people as far as navigating the fees and
entries to the parks? Well, most of the parks
are 25 to $30 for your car
(59:19):
for a week. I mean, think about that. Think about, you go to
Disney World for a day and it and if you, for a family of four,
it's going to cost you a thousand, thousand dollars. You go to a national park
for, for a week and it's 30 bucks.
So, you know, really there's not a, not a
lot there to, you know, to deter you from doing
(59:40):
that. You can buy an annual pass, I think now
is $80. If you're doing a lot of traveling, that's going to pay off
after two parks. So by all means, you know, pick up the
pass and then if you're over 65, you can pick
up the. For $80, you can pick up a pass that's good
for you for the rest of your life. Yeah, it
(01:00:03):
is the, the best investment you will ever make in, in
having fun in the United States. So, you know,
I highly recommend it. But yeah, other,
other than that, it's really not an
expensive proposition to, to visit the parks. If you stay in
the park, you can, you can make your reservations.
(01:00:25):
Usually you have to make them a year in advance for the,
for like the lodges in Yellowstone, in Yosemite that are
so beautiful. And Glacier has a, has a
wonderful vintage lodge as well. These were all built by the
Civilian Conservation corps in the 30s. They're, they're beautiful,
so it's worth it. It's just going to be a little bit
(01:00:48):
pricey maybe compared to, you know, camping, which would
be much less. But you do need to make your reservations way in
advance to be able to get a decent room. Yeah. And
so that's my tip to you guys is we're looking at the
next break would be winter break. As far as extended vacation times.
Leah and I went on our adventure for spring break in the
(01:01:10):
springtime. And something that I will add to
navigating the fees is we. Randi just mentioned that
you pay a fee for a week. So we were able to go to
Saguaro national park and we were able to go to
the Petrovite all in the same week under one fee. And
so that's something I know I've had friends that are like, well, we went here
(01:01:31):
and then we went there when they could have just paid one fee. If you
save your receipt. So don't throw the receipt away. Save it until you're done with
your trip. Very good tip. Thank you. That
makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And so that's something that I hope
people will share their adventures. Let us know. I mean, go follow Randi and let
her know about your adventures out to national park and such.
(01:01:52):
And I thank you for joining me on the show. I know that
definitely some of this is going to be educational to the listeners, and hopefully
it encourages people to get outside rather than posting any
discouragement about getting outdoors. Great.
Thank you so much for having me, Mia. This was really a pleasure. It's always
wonderful to talk with a kindred spirit.
(01:02:16):
Hey, this is Lloyd Bailey, the Armed Lutheran host of the Armed
Lutheran Radio Podcast, reminding you that the
podcast you're listening to is a proud member of the Self Defense
Radio Network. Check out all the great content at
selfdefenseradio. Net.
She's an award winning writer, a hunting guide, archery and rifle instructor,
keynote speaker and all around outdoors woman who encourages
you to get outside, hunt, fish, shoot and savor all that life has to
offer. And now here's your host, Mia Anstein.
Well, hey. Hi. Hello you all, thanks for tuning in. I'm
happy to be visiting with you today to share some adventures.
(00:24):
And I hope these are inspiring and not
intimidating. And that's kind of a preview peek to what we're going to be talking,
talking about. But I want to share outdoor adventures with
you. And today my guest is writing books, a
series about the national parks. And so before
we get going, I kind of wanted to just let you know, as always, there
(00:45):
are going to be links in the show notes. Also if you're watching on
YouTube, you'll be able to see some video pictures of some of the stuff we
talk about and so forth. So go ahead and tune in and subscribe over
there, but obviously not while you're driving. And I
also would like you to please let me know like message on social media
or email. The email address is contact
(01:06):
miaanstein.com let me know where you have
been and which national park is your favorite
here. I want to tell you some interesting fun facts
about the United States national parks. And so of
course Yellowstone is probably the most popular, most famous
national park that we have here in the US and it was established
(01:29):
in 1872. It's the world's first
known geothermal features like Old
Faithful. So the world's first national park that is known for
geothermal features like Old Faithful. A lot of
the parks also boast diverse wildlife, which is a
huge attraction for me. I'm always about the wildlife. Wild
(01:50):
things, flowers, bugs, birds, all of it, like it's all
good. But parks like the Everglades, they protect
rare species like the American crocodile and the Florida
panther. So maybe you can head down there. I don't know if there's, if
anyone is listening, if you've seen a panther, wow, that would
be a little hair raising, a little scary. I don't
(02:11):
know. I also want to talk about some of the size extremes.
We've got Rhett Rang Rangel. Tell me how to say
that. Somebody has got to give me a message. Wrangell St. Elias
in Alaska is the largest with over 13
million acres. And then we have Hot
Springs in Arkansas is one of the smallest national
(02:34):
parks there is. Unique
ecosystems can also be found at the parks. And the
parks vary from deserts in Death Valley which we maybe chat
about a little today to rainforest in Olympic. So you
might hear about some of that in our visit with my guest today.
And of course, we've got huge Grand Canyons. And
(02:55):
geologists are estimating that some canyon layers in some of
the parks date back 2 billion
years. 2 billion. Isn't that incredible? That's something that
when you're outside, do you ever think about how the
canyon or the river, how did it meander, how long
did it take for it to form the way that it is very
(03:18):
intriguing to somebody like me. Maybe I should have studied geology. I don't
know. I have wondered that over the years. But we've also got Mount
Denali. The largest peak in North America is located in
Denali National Park. The most visited park is the Great
Smoky Mountain and it attracts the highest number of annual
visitors. Then we have marine parks like Bisc,
(03:40):
Biscayne, and again, tell me if I'm pronouncing these right or wrong.
Guys, when you're not driving, pull over, send me an email or message me on
social media. But Biscayne and Channel Islands protect
vast amounts of marine environment. And then we have
international sites. Yes, there are international national parks
like Glacier and Waterton in Canada, and they
(04:02):
share the international Peace park
designation, cultural significance. This is something
that is local to me. Places like Mesa
Verde safeguard ancient Native American
cliff dwellings. So without further ado,
disregard my ramblings. Hopefully they make you laugh a little and
(04:23):
share a smile. And then hopefully they encourage you to get outside
and to savor all the world has to offer.
I hope you enjoy the show. Hey friends,
if you're looking for premium performance gear for your next adventure, look
no further than Vormi. Their innovative wool technology is
perfect for any outdoor activity. And, and the best part, you can
(04:46):
also support the show by shopping through my affiliate
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(05:08):
t I n e vorme.com
Miaanstein I also
wanted to suggest that maybe as a group we should try to
read some of the series of books that we're going to be chatting about today.
So if you're interested in that, go ahead and shoot me a
message, let me know and we'll together choose which one to
(05:29):
read first. And I also wanted to remind you that we
currently have a giveaway going on and this is based on the
Hunt, which was the children's book that was written by Stephanie
White. And so don't miss out. It's an exclusive giveaway.
And to get a copy of the book the Hunt, you need to subscribe
to the Mia Anstein Mac Outdoors newsletter.
(05:52):
And if you're already subscribed, shoot me an email. The email address
again is contact miaanstein.com and
tell me what was your favorite part of
the episode number 150, which was with
author Stephanie White, where she talks about her other books
and the book the Hunt. And we'll be giving away a copy
(06:15):
of that book. So without further
ado, I hope you'll go over and enter that as well as let
me know which book you want to read first out of the series
of the Death in the National Parks.
This summer, whether at the range or in the field, WSI Sports
Hypertech Bamboo tanks, tees and leggings will have you
(06:38):
covered. Visit wsisports.com to support the show and
use the affiliate code MACO10 for 10% off your
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Again, that code is MACO10 for 10%.
Off your order@WSISports.com
(07:01):
all right, everybody, I'm happy to have you listening to
the show today and I'm excited to learn because I've
been touring some national parks and an author reached
out to me that has a very interesting series and I wanted
to share that with you while I learn about it as well.
So Randi, would you mind introducing yourself to my guests and
(07:23):
letting them know who you are and what you do? Sure. My name
is Randi Minetor. I am the author of seven books
in the Death in the national park series.
Not Yellowstone or Yosemite, those were other people, but most
of the other ones. And I'm a
professional author who specializes in the national parks
(07:45):
and nature. So when you had mentioned the national parks
and you said that I too was looking at mat national parks.
Last year for spring break, my daughter and I kind of took a tour through
Arizona. We always do whirlwind tours, but we did
go to a couple national parks down there and we had
just looked for points of interest along the way way. And
(08:08):
what I'm curious about is kind of how you came to
want to tour national parks, but also how the
books came to be sure. In
1992, my husband and I did a a
honeymoon road trip. I had never been out west
at all. So he we flew to Minneapolis where his
(08:30):
parents live, rented A car and drove through the
Badlands and Mount Rushmore, around
to Yellowstone, through the Black Hills,
into Grand Tetons, and then on the way came back
home. It was the first I had seen the Rocky Mountains.
And I just fell in love with the whole thing.
(08:52):
And over the course of my career, at that point, I was, I
was working at an advertising agency and
really the course of my career began, became how can
I subsidize this need to see all of the national
parks and all of the affiliates and so on
throughout the national park system? So
(09:15):
I managed to swing a deal with
my publisher, the Globe Pequot Press, to start writing about the
national parks. And happily, that has funded
our travels and our interest
in continuing to plan trips that get us to all of the national
parks. Outstanding.
(09:37):
And when you're doing this, I'm just, I have
so many questions. I always do that go through my head. But how
did you choose your very first national park? I mean,
what was the specific one that you first went to and then how did it
develop from there? Well, it was, you know, going, going
in order along. I 90 essentially was. The
(09:59):
Badlands was the first, the first one for me. And
I, I, you know, in the beginning, I really didn't get
it. Like, what, what is this? Why are they protecting this?
What, what am I supposed to do here? And
once I caught on, and with my husband's help, because he and his
parents did road trips through throughout his childhood and
(10:21):
adolescence, they went everywhere in the country. So he, he
knew what to do. And a few times said to me, get out of the
car. You know, you need to. Let's
go do a hike. Let's go see this beautiful
place. And then I finally caught on to what, what the
parks were about. So as we advanced, you know,
(10:43):
through Mount Rushmore and Black Hills and so
on, I started to understand that the National
Park Service protects the most beautiful places in the
country for our enjoyment. I mean, it's a. It's purely
altruistic and incredible. So by the time we got
to Yellowstone, I, I could, could
(11:05):
hardly contain my excitement. You know, an elk stuck its head right
into our car. We saw bears, you know, all sorts
of animals and birds, and it was just, it was just
joyous. So I got completely hooked.
Completely hooked. That's, I mean, that's something that hooks, I think most people because
we all have such a fascination with wild an. And wild things.
(11:28):
When you have started the series of the books,
which book was the first book? I mean, because I have like the list of
the seven books. And I know, like, which ones I want to read, but do
I need to read them in a particular order? No, not at all.
My. My first one was Death in Glacier national park,
(11:48):
which was essentially an assignment from Lions Press.
My agent walked me up to an editor at a book expo
and said, they're
about to expand the Death series
they had. Actually, the only one they had at that point at
Lyons was Death in Yellowstone, written by the extraordinary
(12:11):
Lee Whittlesey. And it had sold like mad. So
with the centennial of the Park Service coming up in
2016, it sort of dawned on them that, gee,
maybe, maybe we could do more of these. So I was
assigned Death in Glacier National Park. And I had been to
Glacier a few years before, so I at least knew what the.
(12:33):
What the terrain was and, and gotten a feeling
for how truly dangerous it is if you're not
behaving yourself, if you're not following the basic rules of being
outdoors. And when
I started to delve into it, that park had just completed
a list of the two hundred and sixty four
(12:55):
deaths that had taken place since it was declared a park.
And so I had that to start with.
And I was able to start doing research, really, through
mostly newspapers, you know, mostly
news reports of these, of these
events and to get an idea of why people,
(13:19):
you know, two or three people a year in the country,
why they die in national parks. So
it's a fascinating subject. I mean, the real
thing that you realize is that people
make the same mistakes over and over. You
see them making that error of not understanding the
(13:43):
terrain, not doing the research, you know, not.
Not paying attention to what the rangers are telling them and to all the
warning signs. Marching off into the wilderness
with, you know, nothing but a bottle of water and a granola
bar. Things like this that,
you know, unfortunately end in people's deaths.
(14:05):
So. And the more I have explored that
through Zion, Death in Zion, Death in
Rocky Mountain National Park, Death in the Everglades, the
more I see the same kinds of errors over and
over. So when we're looking at the
errors, I mean, I teach hunter education, so we teach survival through
(14:26):
that. Do most people just not have the knowledge
because they haven't been out there? I mean, they're inexperienced and maybe they're not looking
up the tips from the park. Well, you know, a lot of what
we see is that people are out of their element, you know, that
they're, they're used to what they experience at home.
So a couple of skiers from Minnesota
(14:49):
have no real way to understand what the
backcountry in Rocky Mountain national park is going to be like. They come from
the plains. You know, there might be a few hills that they ski, that
they ski on in maybe Wisconsin, but then they get
down there and they really don't, don't
understand the, the enormity of the
(15:11):
terrain. For starters, the, the,
the altitude and how that's going to affect them and how,
how much more tired they're going to be. They also
may expect in one particular instance I have in mind that
this couple also expected that when they got to a
(15:31):
shelter that they knew was there, they expected it to be stocked
with food and water and firewood. And of course it was just
a lean to. So there was none of that. There was no way to get
warm. They hadn't brought any supplies with them.
And this unfortunately led to exposure which led to
hypothermia and so on. And unfortunately they
(15:53):
died. These are the kinds of things that we, that
we see a lot of that people just not understanding
what they're getting into and how the skills they use at home to
walk a trail are not going to work. And at
12,000ft in the Rocky Mountains. Yeah, it's
with the book series. Is it more of let's read an
(16:16):
adventure and hear about these hair raising
tales or are you guys striving to educate
outdoors people who maybe we don't want them to be making
these mistakes. There's, there's both. You know, you read
the tales and, and you know,
I've, I've done my best to make them interesting. They're not
(16:37):
sensationalized. I'm really, I'm a journalist so I'm really trying
to just report the facts. And unfortunately I can't
interview these people because they're dead. So
that's kind of a, kind of a, an obstacle
to being able to truly tell the whole story.
But yeah, there's quite a bit of, you
(17:00):
know, telling, telling what happened to these people. But
there's also a section in the back of every book that is how to stay
alive in this park. Okay. So that,
yeah, so that, you know, there's all the things about carrying the 10
essentials, which I'm me, I'm sure you know very, very well.
You know, food, water, extra clothing, shelter,
(17:23):
compass or some way to navigate. I was very excited. I just
got my iPhone 16 and it's a satellite phone.
That was very exciting that. Okay. You know, people can
communicate now even if they're lost in the, in the back
country. Yeah. And that's something that I've seen is people
who haven't been to areas where there's not cell service,
(17:46):
they think, well, I have my phone, I'm fine. And then they get into the
mountains and it's like, you might have to hike straight up for two
hours to get a signal. And they don't understand that or know that
they could do that. And so to have that capability with your
phone is just. That is a phenomenal progress
in technology. Yes. Yeah, it absolutely is. And
(18:08):
that is one of the things that we discover.
There's a group of people, seven
canyoneers in Zion national park, who,
unfortunately for lack of cell service in the park, did
not get the warning of the flash flood that was just about
to come through and drowned all seven of them in a
(18:30):
canyon. These are the kinds of things that I know,
you know, people rail against the idea of putting up a cell
tower in the middle of a national park,
but the truth is, cell service would save lives. And
right now, for a lot of the parks and a lot of the backcountry, we
don't have that. So having a sat phone in your pocket
(18:51):
is a real. That's a terrific advance,
and I'm sure it's going to save lives out there.
Yeah, I imagine that it certainly will. Just because of
that communication aspect. When I was
kind of researching and looking up all your books, you have a lot
of other books you've written as well, and you mentioned just now that you're a
(19:14):
journalist in the books. Is it
built to be entertaining to the reader? I mean, because the first thing that
I thought of, because I grew up out in a rural area. I mean, I
grew up in the mountains, so things that I think are common sense are probably
not common, but I kind of thought of dumb
ways to die. And do you kind of write
(19:36):
it that way, or is it just strictly news? And I'm a journalist and
I'm just reporting what has happened. What. What type of a read am I looking
at? I'm it. I'm kind of straddling
the two worlds of journalism and, for
lack of a better word, novel writing. I do want to write a
good story, so I do my best to do that with
(19:58):
the information that I have. Some of them, I have a great
deal more detail because they've been written about.
You know, a lot of people are curious about what could have happened in a
particular situation. The one that comes to mind in
Glacier is the night of The Grizzlies in 1967,
when two different grizzly bears in the
(20:21):
same park, 20 miles apart, attacked
two young girls who were camping and ate them.
Two separate bears had never happened before, but
these, you know, in. In two instances in the same
night, and there was tremendous speculation of
what could have made this happen. And, you know,
(20:44):
the, the end result is it was pure coincidence,
but there's a tremendous amount that has been written about that
event. So I was able to draw from
that and tell a very compelling story.
Sometimes, sometimes there's a lot of information, sometimes there's
nothing. You know, there's. There's a couple of guys
(21:06):
who disappeared in the 1920s that, you
know, there's a picture of them waving and smiling at 1 o'clock,
and by 3 o'clock they had completely vanished and they were never
seen, never seen again. Nobody ever was able to solve
that. And unfortunately, I didn't have access to the records of what
the search was like. So it's a short story.
(21:27):
Wow. Yeah. When I, when there's more
information, it's, you know, available. And I
do. I dig through a lot of different kinds of information.
Unfortunately, the parks themselves are not that interested in helping
me. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I
had the best luck in Acadia national park, where the staff was
(21:50):
very accommodating and said, you. You have a right to this
information. I've also had parks that completely
ignored me and refused to give me anything, even
with foia. FOIA requests
that I just. Just not able to pull anything.
There were a couple of investigations that supposedly the
(22:12):
FBI conducted, and when I foiled the
FBI, they said there were no files. So
it's very hard to know, you know, what, what
really went on in some of these cases. And, you
know, if it were, was there truly no investigation? I did
nobody do anything about this. So I, you know,
(22:35):
I do the best I can essentially, with what I have. But
the parks, it's interesting that they don't want to
talk about death in their parks, but they sure do want to sell these
books. And that's interesting to me because part
of some of the places we went, when we went on our little tour,
it's because of the ghost. We did a ghost town tour like the
(22:58):
Loop down in Arizona. And because that's something that's
an attraction for certain tourists. I mean, I say that
because my daughter picked our route and I mean, I enjoyed the
trip too, but I know there's people that specifically would probably go to the park
just for that. And then there's also probably people that would
be frightened and not want to go, like don't want to go outdoors because
(23:21):
they're afraid something's going to happen. They're going to. Eaten by a grizzly bear or
something like that. Right? Yeah. So I can kind
of see both sides of that with, with the National Park Service,
with the nps. And that was going to be one of my questions was how
they're working with you on it. And so some are, some aren't, but
they are selling the book. Oh, yes. Yeah, these
(23:42):
books. I, I actually just got my royalty statement
today on, on for all of my books
with, with this publisher. And yeah, these, these
books sell quite nicely. So I'm, I'm happy
that the park is benefiting from, from the work I've
done and I'm hoping that when I go back, you know,
(24:04):
it's, it's eight years since I wrote Death and Glacier, so in two
years it'll be 10. And usually we do a.
After 10 years. So I'm, I'm hoping that when I
go back to Glacier that they'll be more accommodating
the second time around. Yeah, hopefully. And with each park.
Have you, you've already been to each one before you write
(24:27):
the series, the book in the series? Yes, I, I do my
best to do that in all of these. I have been to the
parks and I, you know,
as, as part of the, part of the research,
it's important to know what the terrain is like. I'm not going to pretend
that I, that I hiked up Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain, which
(24:49):
is a 14, 000 foot mountain. That's, that's
just not within my ability these days.
But I certainly have researched pretty carefully and I, I did
speak to rangers and volunteers there who had done
it to better understand what the obstacles are and
why. Why 75 people have died on that mountain.
(25:13):
That's a, that's an extraordinary number of people.
So it was important to really understand what
that was like. Yeah. Every once in a while I'll get a letter
from somebody or an email from somebody saying, you know, this was a right turn,
not a left turn, and I note that and I'll, I'll, you
know, take that into consideration next time around. But.
(25:35):
Okay, yeah, probably don't need to get too
caught up in the weeds when we're reading a book. But then also it's nice
if they're letting you know. And hopefully if people are letting you know, they're being
courteous about it too, because it sounds to me like you're just trying to help
somebody who wants to go to these places and also tell the
story. I mean, that's something that needs to be documented when
(25:57):
you're telling the story and you talked about maybe there was no police
investigation somewhere, are you kind of putting
theories or hypotheses in there during those moments where there's
nothing? No, I'm really not. I, I
am not personally.
What's the word I want. I don't, I don't have the experience, the,
(26:21):
the search and rescue experience to be able to, to guess what
went wrong. I. But I will interview people who
do know those things and, you know, allow them
to, to say what the educated guess really is.
You know, some of them, it's quite obvious what went wrong,
but some of them, you know, when you have a very
(26:43):
experienced hiker or climber or
canyoneer who gets into some trouble
in a place, then it, you really, you know, you're,
you're getting into where is the equipment
failure or, you know, what, what wrong move did
he make or, you know, did the boulder come out from under his foot or,
(27:06):
you know, what, what happened there. There really no way to know.
What we do know is that he fell 200ft to his death.
So. But people who, who actually do
those kinds of sports are more than willing to
talk to me about what they think went wrong. So there's quite a bit
of that. Yeah. In, in your research, you're kind of
(27:29):
interviewing some of them as well. Somebody who maybe was a rock
climber or something. Yes, yeah, yeah, I
do some of that. I have, you know, spoken to search and rescue
people and to rangers. Certainly the
unfortunate thing is that, that when there's an
accident and one person dies and the other one survives,
(27:51):
the survivor is, is really not willing to talk to
me. They don't want to talk about this ever again. So
I've had a lot of people turn me down for interviews, and that's, that's,
that's fine. That's totally understandable that they don't want to relive this
for what they may interpret as me trying to profit
from their experience. That's not,
(28:14):
you know, that's just not what I, what I,
I don't, I don't want to upset anybody,
you know, by doing this. Right. And I,
I mentioned thinking about dumb ways to die, and that is
not what you're trying to do. You're not trying to capitalize on something like
that. When we're looking at the way people die,
(28:36):
what's the number one way that people are dying in national
parks? It's different for each park. Oddly
enough, in Glacier, it's drowning. You would think it would
be falling off of things. And there's a lot of that and there's
avalanches and so on. But mostly what we see
are people who do not understand that the lakes
(28:59):
and rivers and what they call creeks, that to me
are raging rivers in Glacier are fed
by melting glaciers. So that water
is just above freezing. You're talking about
34 degrees. You go into that water, in a minute and a half, you're
dead. So there are a lot of those.
(29:22):
There's people, kids skipping across a creek,
what's going called a creek on rocks. But the creek is this
rushing thing and they get, they slip, they get
pulled into the river and in, you know, just a couple of minutes,
they're gone. Wow. So there's a, there's a lot
of that. A lot. Also a lot of lakes, people thinking they're going to take
(29:44):
a swim by jumping off a boat, you know, and, and
discovering that Lake McDonald is just freezing
cold and very deep. So we do
see a lot of that
in other parks. Like in Rocky Mountain, the biggest thing is mountain
climbing and
(30:05):
having a fall or getting injured and being stuck at
the top of a mountain or being struck by
lightning is something we see a lot of in Rocky Mountain as
well. Wow. But each, each park has a different,
A different hazard. A different hazard, and lightning is
one. Like, what is the percentage of people that are killed by lightning? It's
(30:28):
very small, but if you're gonna hike that 14 or
your chances increase, well, that's it.
That high up in Rocky Mountain
national park, there's a lightning storm almost every
day, at least in, not so much in the winter, but
spring, summer, fall, every day there's a lightning storm
(30:50):
and it's predictable. So when you're hiking Long's
Peak, they want you to start well before
noon or well before sunup so that you're
nearing the top of the park or the, I'm sorry, the top of
the mountain by late morning
at the latest. Because by 2 or 3 o'clock we're going to
(31:12):
have a lightning storm. So. And you don't want to be
up there to be hit by lightning. You. You become the tallest thing in the
park just by standing there. So, so that's
something that, that's very well publicized. If you're
going to hike Long's Peak, that you got to start early, you got to be
off the mountain by like mid afternoon to avoid that.
(31:34):
Well, a lot of people think that's Nonsense.
So they, you know, so they go ahead and they, they
start, you know, 9:00 in the morning and they get up there and it's two
in the afternoon and the next thing they know there's a
bolt of lightning and they suddenly realize what they've done.
So, and getting down from the mountain quickly at that point
(31:57):
may, may not even be an option. So, so
that's a, that's a thing that happens there. That's one of the big
ones. And so I know a lot of my listeners love to be
outdoors. A lot of them are hunters and some, some of them
don't hunt or get outdoors very much at all.
But I think almost everybody that listens loves wildlife.
(32:18):
And to whoever's listening to the show, if you want to correct me, please
do. I'm always happy to hear from the listeners. But
when you were talking about the grizzlies, is there very much
conflict with the, with the wildlife? I mean, is that a top cause
of death or no? Is it a small amount? It's not a top
cause by any stretch. Grizzly
(32:41):
attacks are very few and far between.
What happened in 1967 has a lot to do
with a policy at Glacier and Yellowstone national
parks at the time that they had these huge garbage dumps
that everybody would just come and, and dump their trash into
and there's, you know, the food they didn't eat and so on. And they set
(33:03):
up bleachers so people would come and sit and watch the
grizzly bears come into these dumps and chow down.
This, this is like mind boggling when you think about
today's National Park Service. That kind of thing would never happen.
So after these two, these two young
women died from bear attacks on the same night,
(33:26):
they shut down all of these dumps and realized that they
had habituated all of these animals to
being around humans and seeing humans as a source of food.
So that practice ended. And then there was a period of all of
those bears that had been habituated to eating at the
(33:47):
dumps every night started to die because they didn't know how to
eat, how to eat any other way. So
this was a pretty dark period for the park Service.
But since then there's there, that's where the, the
bear proof containers come from and the bear proof trash cans and all
of the things that we see now that protect
(34:09):
people and protect the bears from becoming habituated to
people. So there are very few bear attacks at
this point and every time there is one, it makes world news.
So, you know, if you've heard about it. That's all there is.
Other animals generally. Well, the big thing is the
buffalo in Yellowstone that people think
(34:32):
are fluffy cows and think are
domesticated and walk up to the buffalo gores
them. You know that that's
more about human foolishness than it is about the
animal being dangerous. You keep your distance. The buffalo are just
fine. They're not, they're not coming after you.
(34:54):
So you know, there isn't there. Beyond that there aren't
a lot of animal attacks. You don't hear about people being attacked by
deer or elk. There was one
mountain goat and I think it was Olympic, which I
haven't written about yet, where
this mountain goat just gored a guy on a trail.
(35:16):
But that, that was really an individual case.
So. Oh the, you know, the animals are minding their own business and we
should do the same. You just mentioned Olympic
maybe being next on your list. Do you
have a list going like what your next projects are going to be or
is it as that you're publishers are saying which one
(35:38):
you need to do? Well, sometimes they come up with them.
But my editor right now is, is very
willing to hear what my ideas are. And in all honesty,
the. One of the more deadly parks that I haven't
written about yet is Death Valley, mostly
because of heat. So you know, that's a,
(36:00):
that's a very different story from the mountainous parks. So
I'm hoping to do that. It's, it feels like a no
brainer, you know that we should be writing about the park with
death in its name. So,
so I'm hoping that, that, that will be the next one. But we'll talk
about that early next year. Yeah. And have you already gone to Death
(36:22):
Valley or you're going to be at it? You've already been there?
Yes. And yeah, it's, it's big and
flat with, and ringed with mountains. So that
the, the amazing thing about Death Valley is that you can be in
the lowest point in the United States
altitude wise, you know, at Badwater Basin and
(36:44):
looking up at the highest, one of the highest points in
California from there. So yeah, it's a,
it's a really remarkable and beautiful place
but, but really idiosyncratic in terms of how
you can get yourself killed there. When
you're thinking of doing that. What would be the
(37:06):
best time of year? I mean I'm thinking of when I would go there. But
for overall, is each park a different time of year when we should
go or is there a tourist season? Because that's when you should
be there. And how do you kind of decide what time of year you're going
to be at a certain place? Well, people tend to travel in the
summer because they have the time and their kids are off from school
(37:27):
and all those good things. But though the summer is often not the best
time to go to a park, some of them have become so overrun
with tourists that in the summer that they've had to
institute shuttle buses or, you know, timed
entry or, or things like that. So
particularly the Southern parks, really,
(37:51):
October to April is the better time
to go. I'm thinking Death Valley, Big
Bend, saguaro in Arizona and organ pipe
cactus in Arizona. They're going to be beastly hot in the
summer. But we were in Death Valley in
March and it was in bloom, which was really
(38:14):
something to see. And it, it was
about 80 degrees. It was really quite lovely. And very
much the, what you, what you would hope for in
going to a national park. You know, some of
the, the northern parks you really do have to go in the
summer. Glacier in particular, the,
(38:35):
the, the amazing going to the Sun Road is only
open from July to maybe the middle of
September when it starts snowing again. So you
really have to go there in the summer to get the full, the full impact.
Someplace like Yellowstone or Yosemite has something to
offer all the whole year. So anytime you want to
(38:57):
go, you're going to see something special. Yeah, Yellowstone,
I think we can rent snowmobiles and you can kind of do different stuff like
that. And there's trails that they keep open on the north
end, I think. Yeah, I think that's right. And they have
the snow coaches also to take you through. And yeah,
it's one of my dreams is Yellowstone in the middle of
(39:20):
winter. We'll get there eventually. We
ended up in Yellowstone inadvertently in the middle of winter one year,
because GPS maps and that's a totally
different thing, like the trouble that the maps caused. Somebody could write books
about that. But our map took us
to the bottom of Yellowstone and it was taking
(39:42):
us to a hotel north of Yellowstone in December. And it's like the road is
not open. Oh, wow. We didn't, we didn't really pay attention to
it till we were like, wait a second. We ended up staying in the south
end and it was really fun. We got to see a lot of wildlife and
stuff like that. But it just made me giggle because sometimes we
depend a little too much on that technology. Yes.
(40:04):
Yeah. And that's, that's a trap as well, especially if it gives
out on you in the middle of something. So. Yeah, that's important,
definitely. So when you've been out at
parks, have you ever had anything that has been challenging to
you? Have you had any experiences out there that you thought were kind of frightening?
Oh, sure. In particular, there is a hike
(40:27):
in Big Bend national park, which is at the very bottom of Texas.
This, that there's. There's a bird
there, that it's the only place in the United
States that you can see it. It's called the Colima warbler. And I'm a huge
birder. My husband is a bird photographer. So
we, we undertook this,
(40:50):
this hike up from 5,400ft
to 6,800ft to find this bird.
And we did everything wrong. I mean, it's. It's incredible
to me now how foolish we were on this hike. We.
We each took a gallon of water with us, so we thought we had enough
water. We did not. We ran out of water before we got to the
(41:12):
top. We. So it was three hours back
down with no water. We had, you know, sweet and salty
snacks with us that we didn't eat because we weren't hungry because of the
heat. It was 100 degrees. I mean,
everything we did was wrong. And the worst of it is we saw the bird,
but we didn't even. We were so delirious by the time we saw the bird
(41:34):
that we didn't even think to take a picture of it.
So, wow, we put ourselves through this thing
and somewhere, you know, this was the first time,
somewhere along the way that I ever thought I could die
here. I mean, this could be bad.
And luckily it wasn't that long a hike and, you know,
(41:57):
we got back, but it took. It took me a good week to
recover, to get my electrolytes balanced again,
to be able to think clearly. It was. It was very scary.
I. This, this was when I learned that dehydration
can take you very, very fast. Right. That it's not, you
know, it's not three days without water. It could be a few hours before
(42:20):
you really. Your head starts to swim. Yeah. And that's something I think people don't
understand is the three days without water is if you're uncomfortable,
not if you're in high heat or high altitude or super cold
conditions. Because if you're just at a comfortable climate zone, you.
You can go longer. But something like that is very
hard on your body and depletes your nutrients really quickly.
(42:43):
Yes, it sure does. Yeah. And when you're looking at all this,
the studying, you're doing in the research and you're learning about the different ways
people die, what, what do you think is one of the scariest ones? I mean,
I think of hypothermia, heat
exhaustion, stuff like that. It's. To me, that's not
frightening. I mean, it's terrible and it's tragic and probably pretty
(43:05):
ugly. But is there anything that's super creepy or
scary that you've heard about?
Boy, that's a, that's an interesting question. Maybe
just the people who went missing and have never been seen. Well, probably
because heaven only knows where they are or what happened to them.
And that, that is something, you know, some. That's a,
(43:28):
that's a whole different topic about people who just vanish without
a trace. But one thing that
I, that I can't imagine the terror of is
an avalanche. And that's on,
on Mount Washington that I did a book about, even though that's a
state park. But it's the, the highest,
(43:51):
the highest mountain in. I want to say. Yeah,
well, at least in New Hampshire, it might be in New England and
avalanches are very common. And I can't imagine
just seeing that wall of snow coming
at you and being buried alive. I mean, that to me
(44:11):
is the ultimate terror. There's a story about
five young men in Glacier who decided
to try to set a record for winter climbing
a particular mountain on New Year's
Day. And they hid an avalanche and they were all wiped
out. So, but that's, that's the
(44:34):
thing, that whole buried alive concept and knowing
what to do and what not to do to try to get yourself out.
That's. That's one of the things I put in both of those books of what
to do if you're buried in an avalanche. And it's. You. It.
Depending on the weight of what's on top of you, you can
survive. But it, but you have to know what you're
(44:56):
doing. And most of the very experienced mountain climbers do know what
they're supposed to do, but some do not. And
it's very often the last guy in the line that
is buried without, without recourse.
That's. That, that is probably the scariest thing too.
(45:17):
I used to snowmobile a lot and that was something that we always
worried about. And some of the, some of our friends, they'd be like, oh, it's
not going to happen. And you'd watch slabs of snow break free
and it's like, it definitely could happen. Oh, yeah,
absolutely. Yeah. And the thing is that, that the
parks know when there's danger of avalanche. And they
(45:38):
have a rating system and it's, it's in the visitor center.
So stopping first to make sure.
Or calling the hotline, they have hotlines for this or,
you know, looking it up on the website to make sure that you're going
on a day when. When there's a low risk of avalanche.
That's very important. So there are
(46:00):
safeguards in place, but it's all about,
you know, making sure that you take advantage of all of these things
that are out there to help you be safe. And if a ranger tells
you, don't go today, don't go today, you know, it's
that simple. When I give presentations about this, I
talk about the false urgency of limited time.
(46:24):
That idea that I'm only going to be in this park for two
days. I'm, you know, I may never come back here. I'd
better do this. Even though they're saying it's not a good day for it, I'm
going to do it anyway. And that's
unfortunately how you end up dead. So,
you know, that's my. What I, what I say to people is,
(46:45):
what if you don't go, you'll be disappointed, but you'll be
alive. You know, if a ranger's telling
you no, don't do it,
that sounds like. Good advice to me. And I'm just kind of
reflecting because I've been in places that I shouldn't have been.
And it's like hindsight. It's like, why? And because the time
(47:07):
thing, just what you're saying, you know, it's.
Yeah, we could all probably reflect on that. Hopefully people listening are probably thinking
of moments that they've had, maybe on boats without
life jackets. And I'm just saying that because I was on one
where the, the person who owned the boat was like, wait a second, I only
have this many. Like, one of them had. Somebody had either taken or
(47:29):
it wasn't there. And so it was like, okay, well, it's okay. We'll go
anyway. Nothing will happen. But what if something did happen?
That's it. That's how we get these stories, is by that kind of an
attitude. And I definitely, as I said, I'm using my
own example because I'm guilty of, like, yeah, let's just go ahead. It's all right.
So. Right. Exactly. Exactly. There's.
(47:51):
There's one, one story that
is easy to laugh at, but there is
a man in glacier who was taking pictures of
a grizzly that was advancing on him, and he kept taking
the Pictures. And he kept taking the pictures. And the
grizzly is coming right at him. And the last
(48:13):
picture is, of course, the big grizzly with his
paws in the air. And it's like a perfect
documentation of his own death. Wow.
Yeah. Just. How can you possibly
not drop the camera and climb a tree at that point? But
he didn't. He just kept shooting. Wow. That. That
(48:36):
one's kind of like. That takes my breath away. Because I. As I'm. I'm
an outdoor writer, too, and it's like, you have to have pictures for your
articles, but I can't really see myself doing that.
No, I actually. I'm guilty of articles that
I've written that I don't have images for. You know, and it's like, I'm calling
friends, can I buy a picture? Because I need a. You know, you need an
(48:56):
image. But that one's. I can see how
people would do that just for a social media post. I mean, we talked about
the buffalo. We've seen stuff about that. So
that's terrible. Yeah. And selfies are
definitely, you know, not so much in most of the parks that I've
written about. But as time
(49:18):
goes on, you hear more and more stories about people.
Particularly for me, it was Acadia national
park of people standing
out on rocks on the rocky coast of Maine,
taking selfies of themselves with the big waves coming over from a
hurricane that had taken place further south.
(49:41):
And just a way of just grabbing them and
taking them right into the ocean. You know, just the.
The total lack of realization of what a dangerous position
they put themselves in to take a picture.
Yeah. You know, nobody wants to see a selfie of a dead person.
No. That's for sure. Right. And I'm
(50:03):
laughing, but I shouldn't be laughing. That's the truth that, you know, we don't want
to see that. And so thinking of pictures
and whatnot, you're writing these books and you're going on the adventures.
Can you tell us a little bit about the photography in the books?
Well, actually, these books don't have any photography. Okay.
Except on the covers. Most of the
(50:26):
covers were shot by my husband, who photographer Nick Minetor, who
has done the photography for all of our hiking
books and our birding books. So there's plenty
of that. And, you know, most of most of the hiking and so
on that we do is here in New York State, where I
live. We have done quite a number of
(50:48):
books. Hiking waterfalls, hiking through history, hiking the lower
Hudson Valley, hiking the Catskills. You know, all of
These kinds of things. So, so there's a lot of photography
there, but most of our national
park photography ends up on our,
on our Facebook pages and in our social media.
(51:11):
Okay, so far. Well, it's neat
that you have somebody to pal around with and go on adventures
with. I think that's super, super nice to have somebody to do that
with. What is something that you would give someone as a tip?
Tip for going to see national parks? What's your number one
tip? Oh, wow.
(51:34):
You know, it's, it's the tip that, that Nick gave me
back in 1992. Get out of the car. Oh,
that's a good one. Well, most, you see people
all over, all the time,
just, you know, seeing the entire national park through the
windshield. So I have actually memories that are like
(51:56):
a letter box, you know, that the top and the bottom are cut
off because I'm just looking at it through the windshield. Get out of the car.
Take a hike. You know, find a trail that's right
for your skill level, whatever it is. There are easy trails, there are
harder trails. You know, get out into the
wilderness, have an interaction with
(52:18):
nature, maybe see some animals. One of my
favorite moments was when we were hiking in Great Smoky Mountain
national park and two little kids suddenly came running up to
us and yelled, do you want to see a really big spider?
We said, of course we do. So they brought us over
to where their parents were guarding this, this really quite
(52:42):
enormous spider that was on the side of a tree.
It was, it was impressive, but they were so excited.
And that's, that's the thing. You're not going to have an experience
like that sitting in the front seat of your car. You got to get
out and really see what you're, what you're
there to see. And the other thing is I've seen
(53:04):
people stop at pull offs
and rush out with their camera already in
hand with their phone, actually these days and just, just, you
know, do a panorama of
what they're looking at and then just get back in the car and
never stop for two minutes to look at the
(53:26):
view. So thinking, oh, look at it at home,
like, but you're here and it's real. Yeah. And I
would, I would reiterate that as a tip, is that the
pictures never, even if it's the world's greatest photographer, the
pictures never do it justice as what you see when you're there.
And so if you stop and just take a breath and relax for a minute,
(53:48):
it also is great for your health. I mean, just to kind of Connect with
it even. I mean, you're not touching maybe the view, but you're connecting with it
by being there. So I think that's a really good tip. Yeah, that's. That's
exactly it. You know, have the experience, not
through a lens, but have it yourself. And
it makes. It makes a huge difference.
(54:10):
Absolutely. And so we keep talking about these, all your books,
and I. What I'm thinking is I used to do a book club and then
I've been too busy and haven't been doing very good with my book club.
But I'm thinking of maybe challenging my readers to read a few
of these books. Can you tell us where we find them and
then in what order should we read them? If that matters at all?
(54:32):
Yeah, the order is not that important. But that
being said, Death in Glacier and Death in Rocky Mountain are probably
the meatier ones because there's
so many incidents there to talk about. But the books
are available on Amazon and every
other online book retailer. Whatever, whatever your favorite one
(54:54):
is, you can find them there. If you just, you
know, want to Google my name, it'll take you to my Amazon author
page, which will. Where you can
see all of the books I've written that are available. So
that would be probably the easiest way. You can also order them
from your local bookstore.
(55:17):
Excellent. That's great. And then
we can follow you on social media. I'll include some
links to your. To your contacts and stuff in the show
notes. I always try to put those down there. Are there any other
things that you like to mention before I let you go?
Well, I do. I am starting an email newsletter, so
(55:39):
if you go to my website, you'll be able to sign up for that.
And. No, I mean, other than that, I think
we. We've really covered it pretty nicely. Mia, I really appreciate you
taking the time to delve into this topic. Well, I mean
it. To me, death isn't something that's fun to talk
about. And that's very much why I was curious what
(56:02):
angle the books are taking. And
journalistic, I think, is probably good and more
for reporting rather than entertaining. And
obviously you have to entertain to keep people reading. Yes, but there's
all different styles of books. And I was going to ask you about the publishing,
but you answered that immediately, right away. So we already understood
(56:24):
that. And I think it's important for my listeners to understand that
because I think a lot of people, I have people, they're like, oh, you're a
writer. Like, that's boring. Like, you don't do Anything. And it's
like, it's hard work. Yes, yes, yes.
And you're doing a bunch of research and traveling, so I'm sure you get to
have some fun adventures on along the way. What, what's your favorite park
(56:45):
you've been to so far? Boy, you know, it is so
hard to answer that and usually it's whichever one we've just
left. But I have a personal love of
Zion national park,
where. Because when you go into
Zion, you go in at the bottom of the canyon rather than at the
(57:06):
top like at the Grand Canyon. So you have this
essentially 2000 foot vermillion
hug around you. It's a
bright, bright, brilliant orange
area and with all the rock
formations and the Virgin river running through there and
(57:27):
the fact that you can walk up the Virgin river for three
miles and see slot canyons, which are
really unique to Utah and Arizona
and something you really need to experience. It's just, just
a beautiful, beautiful place. The hiking is not that
difficult. You can, you can make it difficult. You can do
(57:49):
canyoneering and climb up the 2,000 foot canyons, but it's not
necessary. You can have a wonderful time there.
Absolutely. And thinking of that, I know it's probably
been five or six years ago, time flies. But, but there was an
issue in Zion with graffiti. Do you have any, I
don't even know if you advice, but any instructions to people when they're going to
(58:11):
these places and how they should respect the places? Oh, absolutely.
Leave them as you found them. There's no reason to mar
a national park. There's nothing to be
gained from that. You don't need to carve your initials into things.
Just take pictures. You know the, that old,
old adage, you know, take nothing but, but pictures,
(58:35):
leave nothing but footprints. It's. There are
beautiful places and you want to leave them exactly as they are for the
next person to enjoy. And you want to be able to come back and bring
your children and your children's children to these
parks. Exactly. That's, yeah, super
important. And I mean that goes for. Even if you're not in a national
(58:56):
park, but in, in the national park, the, the nps,
National Park Service. Is there any tips on how
to. I'm imagining you must have an annual pass. Do you have any
tips or advice for people as far as navigating the fees and
entries to the parks? Well, most of the parks
are 25 to $30 for your car
(59:19):
for a week. I mean, think about that. Think about, you go to
Disney World for a day and it and if you, for a family of four,
it's going to cost you a thousand, thousand dollars. You go to a national park
for, for a week and it's 30 bucks.
So, you know, really there's not a, not a
lot there to, you know, to deter you from doing
(59:40):
that. You can buy an annual pass, I think now
is $80. If you're doing a lot of traveling, that's going to pay off
after two parks. So by all means, you know, pick up the
pass and then if you're over 65, you can pick
up the. For $80, you can pick up a pass that's good
for you for the rest of your life. Yeah, it
(01:00:03):
is the, the best investment you will ever make in, in
having fun in the United States. So, you know,
I highly recommend it. But yeah, other,
other than that, it's really not an
expensive proposition to, to visit the parks. If you stay in
the park, you can, you can make your reservations.
(01:00:25):
Usually you have to make them a year in advance for the,
for like the lodges in Yellowstone, in Yosemite that are
so beautiful. And Glacier has a, has a
wonderful vintage lodge as well. These were all built by the
Civilian Conservation corps in the 30s. They're, they're beautiful,
so it's worth it. It's just going to be a little bit
(01:00:48):
pricey maybe compared to, you know, camping, which would
be much less. But you do need to make your reservations way in
advance to be able to get a decent room. Yeah. And
so that's my tip to you guys is we're looking at the
next break would be winter break. As far as extended vacation times.
Leah and I went on our adventure for spring break in the
(01:01:10):
springtime. And something that I will add to
navigating the fees is we. Randi just mentioned that
you pay a fee for a week. So we were able to go to
Saguaro national park and we were able to go to
the Petrovite all in the same week under one fee. And
so that's something I know I've had friends that are like, well, we went here
(01:01:31):
and then we went there when they could have just paid one fee. If you
save your receipt. So don't throw the receipt away. Save it until you're done with
your trip. Very good tip. Thank you. That
makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And so that's something that I hope
people will share their adventures. Let us know. I mean, go follow Randi and let
her know about your adventures out to national park and such.
(01:01:52):
And I thank you for joining me on the show. I know that
definitely some of this is going to be educational to the listeners, and hopefully
it encourages people to get outside rather than posting any
discouragement about getting outdoors. Great.
Thank you so much for having me, Mia. This was really a pleasure. It's always
wonderful to talk with a kindred spirit.
(01:02:16):
Hey, this is Lloyd Bailey, the Armed Lutheran host of the Armed
Lutheran Radio Podcast, reminding you that the
podcast you're listening to is a proud member of the Self Defense
Radio Network. Check out all the great content at
selfdefenseradio. Net.
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