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Comment by tasuki | Hacker News Reader

How does:

> Either way, statistically, one of you will die this summer.

go together with:

> But you can take comfort in knowing that there were less than eight deaths per 10 million visits to national park sites between 2007 and 2018.

I'm confused. How many people were there in that room when the ranger said statistically one of them would die? Were they for some reason more statistically likely to die than the other visitors? What was the reason?

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They were employees of the park, not random visitors.

How many do you think there were? And what do you think is a chance for a single park employee to die during a given summer? To me, this still doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Maybe the ranger was talking about all the workers at the park? Looking at the NPS site, the park seems to have 9 hotels most with restaurants. So I'd guess there's probably maybe 1000 seasonal service workers in the park. 1 death out of 1000 seems plausible.

9,980,000 of those 10 million visitors arrive in a car, truck, or RV, walk less than 1km, stay on the marked trail between the visitor center and the gift shop, and leave in less than 4 hours so they can hit the outlet mall before checking into the hotel, overeating at the buffet, and falling asleep watching pay-per-view. Unless they trip and fall in the rush to the ice cream vendor or have a fatal heart attack from walking the 1km, there isn't that much that can go wrong. America!

Park staff activities tend to be a wee bit more risky.

The employees often work in the wilderness doing things like trail maintenance, and they're often young free-thinkers. Dropping acid and going swimming like the author recounts does not sound out of the ordinary.

They may be at slightly higher risk than the average family of four, and they rack up dozens of visits every season.

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