A Taiwanese Man Dead in Yellowstone After a Falling Tree Hit His Head

choi

News release: Yellowstone Visitor Killed By Falling Tree. Yellowstone National Park, National Park Service. US Department of the Interior. June 10, 2014.
www.nps.gov/yell/parknews/14038.htm

Note:
(a) Grand Prismatic Spring
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prismatic_Spring
(b) Trail Map of Fairy Falls - Yellowstone National Park.
www.everytrail.com/guide/fairy-f ... e-national-park/map

The red color marks the Fairy Falls trail (2.5 miles), whose destination is the 197-foot-tall Fairy Falls (falls = 瀑布).  You can zoom OUT and see the trailhead is due north of the Old Faithful (this Google map does not have the scale, so the distance between the trailhead and Old Faith is unclear).
(c) For lodgepole pine, see Pinus contorta
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_contorta
(a common tree in western North America; The species name contorta arises from the twisted, bent pines found in the coastal area)

However in Yellowstone, the pine is straight, as shown in two photos of this Wiki page.
(d) trailhead (n; First Known Use 1948): "the point at which a trail begins"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trailhead
(e) Today Central News Agency of Taiwan reports Taiwan is helping the family to come to US to claim the body.

choi

Jared Diamond, That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer. New York Times, Jan 29, 2013.
www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/scien ... ng-lifes-risks.html

Quote:

(a) “You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I’m 75.) * * * ’Really!’ you may object. ‘What’s my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?’ My answer: Perhaps, but that’s not nearly good enough.

(b) “This calculation illustrates the biggest single lesson that I’ve learned from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea: the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.

“I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.

“Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent.

“I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.

“Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.

“I now think of New Guineans’ hypervigilant attitude toward repeated low risks as ‘constructive paranoia’: a seeming paranoia that actually makes good sense. Now that I’ve adopted that attitude, it exasperates many of my American and European friends.

(c) “Traditional New Guineans have to think clearly about dangers because they have no doctors, police officers or 911 dispatchers to bail them out.

Note:
(a) Jared Diamond
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond

is a noted author. I started paying attention to him when I read  
Jared M Diamond, Linguistics: Taiwan's gift to the world. Nature 403, 709-710 (2000)
www.scribd.com/doc/38601813/Jare ... s-gift-to-the-world