What Happened In Yosemite?

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Mystery surrounds death of California family hiking Yosemite

KNX 1070 News Radio Los Angeles on MSN.com|20 hours ago
The bodies of Jonathan Gerrish, Ellen Chung, their one-year-old daughter, Miju and a family dog were found Tuesday. The family reportedly left home for a hike on Sunday near an isolated patch of Yosemite National Park.

Missing Northern California family of 3 found dead near remote Yosemite hiking area

Mercury News|2 days ago
A Northern California family of three that had been reported missing was found dead Tuesday along with the family's dog on a hiking trail in a remote area of the Sierra National Forest.

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Speculation has been about gasses form a mine and an algae bloom in water.

 

[dainthomas]

I wonder if that means they think there might be a fire in that mine? Since those are impossible to put out, sounds like the trail might need to just be closed if that's the case.

 

[woolfe9998]

Latest news is that the initial autopsy failed to reveal cause of death for any of them. Which is really odd.

Initial autopsy fails to reveal what killed a family and their dog on a hiking trail near Yosemite | CNN

The mystery surrounding the deaths of a couple, their baby daughter and the family dog found on a hiking trail near Yosemite National Park is deepening after autopsies yielded no immediate clues as to what caused their deaths.

www.cnn.com

Leading suggestions seems to be toxic algae and carbon monoxide from mines. I tend to favor the carbon monoxide theory, as CO causes death by asphyxia, which can be difficult to determine in an autopsy.

 

[BoomerD]

I wondered if they happened on a patch/cloud of H2S. Happens periodically in places like western Wyoming and Yellowstone.

 

[Indus]

Sounds like CO.

 

[hal2kilo]

Sounds like CO.

Something like that happened in the Mammoth lake area, about a decade ago. Had a thing on Nat Geo or Discovery about it. Whole area of trees dead and the guy doing the video had a monitor that said it was bad, and he started to feel woozy and got out of there.
Mammoth is just on the other side of the mountain from Yosemite.

 

[MtnMan]

It's the lizard people the Qidiots keep warning us about.

 

[MtnMan]

Sounds like CO.

You are probably thinking of CO2. A lake in Africa released a cloud of it, and it killed 1700 people.

Lake Nyos disaster - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Ken g6]

Sounds like CO.

CO poisoning is pretty obvious, I hear. Turns the body bright red.

You are probably thinking of CO2. A lake in Africa released a cloud of it, and it killed 1700 people.

Lake Nyos disaster - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That seems more likely.

 

[BoomerD]

CO poisoning is pretty obvious, I hear. Turns the body bright red.That seems more likely.

From the CNN article above

First responders initially treated the area as a possible hazmat scene because of concerns over carbon monoxide from nearby mines.

 

[Indus]

You are probably thinking of CO2. A lake in Africa released a cloud of it, and it killed 1700 people.

Lake Nyos disaster - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

No I was thinking of carbon monoxide since their pet died too and fast.

 

[woolfe9998]

As of yesterday, they still haven't completed the autopsy in that the toxicology reports haven't come back yet. Might solve the mystery once completed.

‘Not one clue’: The mystery is only deepening around the family found dead on a Sierra trail

There are no obvious signs of trauma or notes indicating troubles for the family who died...

www.sfchronicle.com

 

[Moonbeam]

CO is lighter than air and CO2 heavier. You would have to be in an inclosed space to be be CO poisoned or inclosed or at the bottom of a depression to be poisoned byCO2 seems to me. Don’t know where the bodies were found but if out in the open either gas doesn’t make sense to me. What in Yosemite would be a killing source of either that could get you while hiking.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

There's the algae thing, but wouldn't that mean they all had to consume water from the same source at more or less the same time? Or can algae put out a gas?

 

[H T C]

Could it be methane gas?

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I'm kind of wondering if they've ruled out heat, though that would also seem odd to take them all down so close to the same time.

 

[Amol S.]

There's the algae thing, but wouldn't that mean they all had to consume water from the same source at more or less the same time? Or can algae put out a gas?

Some microbes do give out S2O in the metabolistic process.

 

[Amol S.]

Could it be methane gas?

With the ambient heat at Yosemite, I tend to think methane would just autoignite.

 

[Panino Manino]

You are probably thinking of CO2. A lake in Africa released a cloud of it, and it killed 1700 people.

Lake Nyos disaster - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Date: 21 August

 

[Jaskalas]

We like to think the world is safe, but it is most certainly not.

It is a shame they ended up dying, and it'll be worse if we cannot determine why. Knowledge can help us boost protection and avoidance to future hikers.

 

[hal2kilo]

Something like that happened in the Mammoth lake area, about a decade ago. Had a thing on Nat Geo or Discovery about it. Whole area of trees dead and the guy doing the video had a monitor that said it was bad, and he started to feel woozy and got out of there.
Mammoth is just on the other side of the mountain from Yosemite.

Seeing the following posts. He was detecting CO2.

 

[MtnMan]

No I was thinking of carbon monoxide since their pet died too and fast.

OK, you proved you didn't read the fucking link I included, or have the basic understanding ALL FUCKING MAMMALS require oxygen to survive. 3500 livestock were also killed.

Thanks for playing...

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

The Lake Nyos thing was an oddity, but not exclusive. It's happened before and since and there is a monitoring effort to watch for it again.



I'm not sure there's a large enough lake near this event to overturn like that and expel a large amount of gas. And if it did, they'd be finding other animals.

 

[MtnMan]

I'm kind of wondering if they've ruled out heat, though that would also seem odd to take them all down so close to the same time.

Put an entire fucking zoo in a confined space, and throw in a bunch of humans for good measure. Remove all the oxygen by replacing it with CO2, or nitrogen, or argon, or helium, and watch every fucking mammal in the room die, and quickly.

 

[hal2kilo]

Put an entire fucking zoo in a confined space, and throw in a bunch of humans for good measure. Remove all the oxygen by replacing it with CO2, or nitrogen, or argon, or helium, and watch every fucking mammal in the room die, and quickly.

I love it when people say CO2 is non harmful. Yea, try breathing pure Argon. It's noble, doesn't react to hardly anything, it's not toxic. If you crowd out oxygen, it just doesn't matter. My years in the shipyard, probably in my 39 years, there were several suffocation deaths due to argon in tanks.