A ranger told them there were storms in the forecast
Rohloff said. “I was like, ‘We have got to get down now, because we don’t want to be up here with any rain. It rolled in literally out of nowhere.’”
Storms forecast? Let’s scale up a slippery sheer granite cliff with no safety equipment. The level of stupidity here is truly astounding.
They even say that after Yellowstone put in its permit limit to 300 per day on the summit, incidents more than doubled because how hard the permits are to get causes more people to go up whether or not the weather is bad.
Also, important to note that weather in the mountains changes frequently and without warning. I do a lot of hiking myself, and I’ve gone into the mountains on days expecting absolute lashings of rain and got nothing, and more often I’ve gone on days where higher summits forecasts show clear or just in the clouds, and had to turn back because the storms and winds got so high.
Now even if I’ve planned a hike for weeks and the weather looks great, I’ll still double check before I drive up. If it’s just a bit of rain it’s usually not the end of the world. It’s when they say bad storms, flooding, lightning on the summit/winds above 70 mph where I’ll bail.
I don’t think it’s necessarily stupid and there were clearly a load of other people up there as well. Its just really shitty.
I could have made this mistake. Trying to make good of the lottery to hike with my daughter. Seeing all the other tourists tossing care to the wind would have kept my guard down.
Mountains create their own weather. It can even differ from valley to adjacent valley. Seeing clear skies doesn’t forecast the next hour but also doesn’t say turn around. We’ve all pushed the limits and gambled it just didn’t work out for them in the worst way.
