There's a lot of things that are not so great about the United States but there is one thing that I believe we do very very correctly here and that is the maintenance of our national parks.
We have a ton of them and they are very nicely kept and they also have a lot of services such as rescuing your dumb ass after you fall off of something.
Recently there was a rather massive operation to get an injured nature person out of the bottom of a waterfall after he fell down there. This was at Big Bradley Falls in Polk county and I have been there, but it was so long ago that I don't really even remember what it looks like.
I do however, remember a time that I went to a place called Crabtree Falls in Virginia while I was in high school and came extremely close to dying that day because of a slip that could have resulted in a 1200 foot drop almost certainly to my death.
This aint exactly Niagara in the waterflow or the ferocity of it but one of the things that makes Crabtree perhaps even more dangerous than Niagara is the fact that there is a huge amount of freedom here. Basically all they do is tell you, "hey, some of those rocks are quite slippery!" then send you on your way to do whatever you want.
Like a lot of people, I was invincible in my teenage years and not silly yellow sign was going to keep me on the trail. I wasn't the only one either, almost everyone up at the top was not on the trails and many people were trying to get right to the edge to have a harrowing look at the huge drop from the edge. I didn't intentionally go that far, but what happened was I was dicking around like almost everyone was up there and not only did I find some of these slippery rocks they were referring to but I actually slipped and fell into the water flow heading towards the edge.
The rest of the rocks are covered in moss as well and you simply cannot get a foothold. I wasn't moving super fast or anything but the panic definitely started to set in as my giggle faded and I realized I was heading towards the edge and the ground wasn't getting any easier to get grip on under the water. Even though I was only perhaps in a foot of water or so, there was no standing up in that. It's like the bottom was covered in oil on top of ice. I swam in one foot of water and reached the side where I caught my hand on some jagged rocks, cutting my hands but it was better than the alternative which was to plunge off the side.
Let's just say that was a real eye-opener to me on that day and I have mostly stayed on the trails not just in nature but in a lot of situations where there are warning signs like that.
I'll later talk about this crazy unmonitored place called "Garden of the Gods" in Southern Illinois that I have been to as well where there is potential death in every direction as well.
I came about 4 seconds from losing my life that day and I can still see it in my mind like it happened yesterday even though it was over 30 years ago that this event happened.
Even though there are plenty of opportunities to hurt yourself or even die in this, and many other national parks, I do still like that there is some level of freedom there and they don't have everyone caged in like birds and make it impossible for you to venture off the paths. I think that most sensible people only need to look death in the eyes once before they start to heed the warnings of the signs.
