My wife and I decided to plan a family vacation. My wife wanted to visit a national park. I wanted to visit somewhere focused mostly on different ways people can die. We chose a place which defied this seeming paradoxical prerequisite: Yosemite National Park.
I was not disappointed. The first momento I found in the tourist shops was the following book (note the rotting corpse in the detail).
After this we listened to a forest ranger enumerate other ways visitors have shuffled of this mortal coil. Twenty minutes of the presentation were dedicated to an innocent boy who had accidentally dropped a few potato chips. As he went to pick them up, a deer started to eat them. The boy startled the deer which gored him with his antler, nicking an artery in his chest causing his abdomen to swell to four times its original size until he exploded in a ball of gore and blood.
The Ranger brought to light various other facts such as the leading cause of death in the park is bubbles. People swim in the rapids and can't float in the foamy parts and sink straight to the bottom. Of course any unusual way a person can die is of critical importance to a ninja. You never know when you might need to conceal a corpse, and a foaming rapid is handy.
Rather than bring back the obligatory stack of vacation picture,s I would mount a camera at the base of El Capitan with a motion sensitive trigger with a 200 mph threshold. Now every time someone plummets off of face to their doom, the moment will be updated automatically on the blog. I've only received one picture so far and it looks like I'm going to have to add a flash for night casualties, as you can see below.
