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Our national parks – majestic vistas, stirring histories and highly-sought suicide sites
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The Canyon sees an average of two suicides per year (AP)
From the woods of Georgia’s Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield to Utah’s Canyonlands, an increasing number of visitors to America’s national park system are choosing the sites to end their lives.
Although the National Park Service doesn’t consistently track the number of suicides on park properties, at least 33 people are known to have ended their lives in a national park in 2008.
Park Service search-and-rescue reports list 26 suicides (or probably suicides) in 2007, 18 in both 2005 and 2006, and 16 in 2004.
In the past year, a 46-year-old cancer patient canoed into the Everglades and never returned; a 53-year-old Pennsylvania man shot himself in the chest in Glacier National Park; and three people jumped from a bridge over West Virginia’s New River Gorge.
Twenty-six people attempted suicide at Colorado's National Monument in just the past year. Two were successful.
Patrick Suddath, branch chief of Ranger Operations at Glacier National Park, told the Associated Press that, “It's some place where, toward the end of someone's life, when they're feeling a total sense of despondency, they want to return to a place of natural beauty ... for their final moments.”
It is estimated that more than 270 million people visited the country’s 391 national parks in 2008. The Grand Canyon sees more suicide attempts than any other park – averaging two a year. Three people killed themselves at the Canyon in 2008.
Read more here.
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