Hiker dies from Nevada Fall, woman survives rescue effort

It is the haunting quiet as the man floated through her camera frame that Freesia Gaul will remember.

Only his head and baseball cap were visible above the churning Merced River, heading for Nevada Fall in Yosemite National Park around 11 a.m. on Saturday, June 20.

“The water looked weirdly calm, it was beautiful, and then I realized in the frame was this guy swimming,” Gaul said in an interview.

“But the current was incredibly strong,” she said.

The man in the water, 22-year-old Josue Alfaro, was silent.

No screaming. No struggle.

Gaul, 20, a former lifeguard at the famous Bondi Beach in Australia, knew the man’s silence was a sign of trouble. She had seen this play out before.

Maybe he swallowed some water or was in shock, she thought. Or perhaps, at that point, he had accepted his fate as he accelerated toward the waterfall.

“One of the scary things about it is he didn’t shout. He didn’t try to get out. And this is the thing that really pissed me off about it in the end,” said Gaul.

The onlookers were quiet too.

“It’s a tragedy, but when you’re in a situation like that, you need to make a scene,” she said.

She dropped her camera and began yelling at him, instructing him to swim with the current toward the side. But he didn’t seem to know how to swim.

There wasn’t time to find a stick for him to grab on to, so without hesitation or a second to spare, she jumped in to try and save him. She says her “lifesaving instincts” overrode her own survival instincts.

She also remembered her training: “Don’t become a second victim.”

“They can’t swim to you, the only thing you can do is try to get to them. But it drastically lowers your odds of living, basically,” Gaul said.

She thought if she could navigate along the rockier side of the river bank, avoiding the depths, maybe she could pull him over.

At one point, she estimates she was only an arms length away from Alfaro. He was reaching out too, but couldn’t swim toward her.

The next moment the undercurrent dragged him underwater, like a “washing machine effect,” she said.

She never saw him again.

Alfaro plunged over Nevada Fall, dropping nearly 600 feet to his death.

Gaul thought she was next. She was now caught in the undercurrent.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman standing on a rock just beneath the footbridge, reaching out with a walking stick.

But suddenly, Gaul was pulled under, too.

She hit bottom, pushed up with her legs, and when she surfaced, she grabbed the stick and was pulled to safety.

Gaul estimates she was three meters, or about 10 feet, from intense rapids and the point of no return.

After she was rescued, she met Alfaro’s grief stricken mother and sister who had been with him on the hike.

Alfaro lived in Los Angeles. A GoFundMe page has been set up to help Alfaro’s family return his remains to his native El Salvador.

The aftermath

In a phone interview with the Mariposa Gazette six days later, Gaul, a young tech entrepreneur and engineer, recalled the events of that warm and sunny Saturday morning with precision and detail.

Gaul’s specialty is pairing robotics with virtual reality.

What happened at Nevada Fall wasn’t virtual reality, it was all too real, and she admits she is still processing the quiet nightmare.

But she has thoughts.

Thoughts about how this particular tragedy, and perhaps others along Yosemite’s famous Mist Trail, could be prevented; thoughts about what hikers need to do when shocking events like this unfold in real time; and, thoughts about how Yosemite National Park, one of the nation’s premiere travel destinations, handled the aftermath.

Gaul and a group of friends she was hiking with arrived at Nevada Fall just before 11 a.m. She was relieved she had beaten the crowd.

As she surveyed the placid scene, she took a few pictures of Alfaro, who was further upstream. She believes he entered an upper pool area where the slippery granite makes for a natural water slide.

“He was definitely swimming in there for fun,” she said.

“But the problem with that is because these slides go in the path of least resistance, they’re heading into the most dangerous part of the current. So that meant he’s pushed to the left side of the shore where it’s incredibly steep to get out and no one can reach you.”

His death fits a pattern of tragic miscalculation in Yosemite National Park.

Trouble on the Mist Trail

The Mist Trail, which includes Nevada and Vernal falls, is one of the most popular trails in Yosemite with 85,000 hikers every year.

It can also be one of the most dangerous, despite numerous warnings and obvious guardrails.

All of the deaths have occurred because people ignored those warnings.

In September 2018, Tomer Frankfurter, an Israeli citizen, died after he fell from Nevada Fall.

Frankfurter told a group of friends he was going to hang from a rocky cliff directly adjacent to Nevada Fall.

He apparently wanted to recreate a common tourist “selfie” in Brazil’s Barra de Guaratiba. Known as the “cliff-illusion,” the photo op plays with perspective, and looks precarious, yet is quite safe.

But Frankfurter had made a fatal error in judgment. He was hanging from a slippery precipice. There was no soft landing. Only a 600 foot drop.

The National Park Service investigation of the accident, made public through the Freedom of Information Act, has an ominous point of comparison to the most recent tragedy.

Frankfurter was oddly quiet, according to witnesses. His friends didn’t realize his peril until he began speaking softly, in Hebrew, and asking for help.

His friends and others ran to his aid to try to lift him up, grabbing him by his forearms, but in Frankfurter’s panic his hands began to sweat.

Frankfurter tumbled to his death down the side of the waterfall.

In July 2011, three people were killed when they fell from Vernal Fall, below Nevada Fall.

The three victims — Ramina Badel, Hormiz David and Ninos Yacoub — were on a church day trip when they ignored warning signs and crossed a guardrail to take pictures.

One of them slipped on the rocks and got caught in the current. The other two jumped in to help.

The three were holding on to each other in a bear like hug as they went over the 317 foot waterfall.

Statistics and risk

As tragic as these cases can be, the park’s mortality statistics tell a more nuanced story of risk.

From 2014 to 2019, there were 98 deaths in Yosemite National Park, according to the NPS dashboard. By any measure, it is an incredibly small fraction of the four million people who visit Yosemite each year.

Of those 98 deaths, roughly half, 47 were classified as unintentional fatalities due to accidents within the park. There were 33 deaths from medical issues, eight suicides and 10 deaths were undetermined.

Of the 47 unintentional deaths, falls were the leading cause, claiming 30 lives.

Isolating those who died from falls, most were engaged in higher risk activities: 14 were climbing, eight were hiking, three base jumping, two were taking photographs, one person was canyoneering and another person was rock scrambling.

Ninety percent of those who died from falls in the park were men.

Looking for solutions

The Mist Trail will be getting a major facelift in the coming years. The National Park Service is soliciting feedback on three proposals to remodel the hiking route. Those upgrades also include plans to make the trail safer for hikers.

Given her background, Gaul is tempted to think there is an engineering fix that could save lives, but she also understands why people would oppose anything that would alter the natural landscape.

Still, she believes there may be some simple, elegant and inexpensive solutions.

She believes there could be metal poles available at the pedestrian bridge, or perhaps poles connected to some kind of rope and inflatable device.

And while there are plenty of signs warning about dangers along the Mist Trail, some in fire engine red, she believes those warnings get lost in visual noise of other signage, or at least overwhelmed by the natural beauty of the surroundings.

She has another idea. It won’t be popular, but it might be effective.

Gaul believes there should be some kind of memorial marker with the faces of those killed, that with their families’ permission, provides a brief narrative of exactly how they died.

“It needs to be more than putting up a sign that says this could kill people. It says, ‘It kills people, and these are the people,’” said Gaul.

“No one trusts signs, but they do trust stories, and that’s why I’m even talking about it,” she said.

An information gap

It is also why she was so dismayed by Yosemite National Park’s muted response to the tragedy and how it refused to confirm the fatality until four days later — and only after The Washington Post pointed out the glaring omission.

A Yosemite National Park spokesperson issued a three sentence statement two days after Alfaro’s death, saying only that there was an investigation into an “incident” at Nevada Fall. The official statement did not even acknowledge it was a fatality.

The Mariposa Gazette followed up with a park spokesperson the next day to confirm it was a fatality, and he refused.

The Mariposa County Sheriff’s Office, which also acts as the county coroner, independently provided the victim’s name and age.

Social media filled the information vacuum.

An eyewitness account on Reddit was widely circulated and formed the basis for much of the initial media reporting of what happened.

That witness account incorrectly assumed Alfaro and Gaul were friends who had entered the water together.

The Washington Post reported last week that the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, has a new policy that prohibits park staff and other employees from confirming deaths or details about severe injuries.

The newspaper cites an internal Department of the Interior memo announcing the change.

In response to The Washington Post story, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said in a statement, “The narrative being presented is false and reflects a significant mis-characterization of the department’s guidance.”

“The guidance was developed to create a more consistent approach to incident communications across the department and is not intended to conceal fatalities or delay information,” the statement said.

The same day The Washington Post story was published, June 24, four days after Alfaro’s death, Yosemite National Park finally issued a press release confirming the victim’s name and the fact it was a fatality.

“Being quiet about it isn’t the right approach,” said Gaul, who believes fear can be a helpful emotion to change behavior.

For that reason, she hopes the story of what happed to Alfaro, and the picture she captured of his final moments, could serve a greater purpose.

“Fear doesn’t actually exist for no reason. People feel scared when they see images of him or scared when they see these waterfalls, and I think that’s an incredibly good thing,” she said.

“Most of the time the news serves up fear for no reason. This is a good reason that could keep someone else’s brother alive.”