ZION NATIONAL PARK, Utah — Zion National Park rangers regularly warn hikers that flash flooding during monsoon season can turn southern Utah’s beautiful canyons into deadly channels of fast-moving water and debris. But dozens of adventure-seekers go anyway, eager to rappel down the colorful, undulating sandstone walls.
That decision proved deadly for one group of hikers who got trapped by floodwaters in a popular “slot” canyon as narrow as a window in some spots and several hundred feet deep.
Six have turned up dead. One is missing.
A sudden deluge of rain fueled the flood Monday evening, which “went from a trickle to a wall” of water, park ranger Therese Picard said. Zion officials said the group got a permit to hike Keyhole Canyon early that morning — hours before a flash-flood warning prompted park officials to close the canyons. By that time, park officials say there was no way to reach them in time to alert them to the violent floodwaters coming their way.
“Ninety percent of Zion is wilderness,” Picard said. “It is not possible to contact everyone.”
Six of the hikers were from California and one from Nevada. All were in their 40s and 50s.
The flood marks one of the deadliest weather-related disasters at a national park in recent history, park service officials said. It evoked memories of a 1997 incident near Page, Ariz., where 11 hikers died after a wall of water from a rainstorm miles upstream thundered through Lower Antelope Canyon, a narrow, twisting series of walls located on Navajo land.
The deadly events at Zion happened at the same time flash floods tore through a small community on the Utah-Arizona border just south of the park, leaving at least 12 people dead.
Crews — including the Utah National Guard, a federal task force and local officials — are searching a seven-mile length of Short Creek to try and find a boy who turned 6 last month. The last body recovered was found 6½ miles from where a van and an SUV carrying 16 people were swept away.
Three children survived, including a boy who told Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox that he escaped by cutting through an air bag, climbing out a window and jumping off the roof of the vehicle.
