Rockfall Kills Two Visitors To Yosemite National Park

By Kurt Repanshek - December 30th, 2022

A California couple was killed by a rockfall while driving in Yosemite/Rebecca Latson file

A California couple driving in Yosemite National Park was killed this week when an estimated 185 tons of rock peeled away from a cliff high overhead and slammed into their rental truck.

Georgios Theocharous, 51, and Ming Yan, 35, of San Jose, were about a half-mile east of the park's Arch Rock Entrance Station on the west side of the park when the rock rained down on them Tuesday morning, park spokesman Scott Gediman said Friday afternoon.

It's estimated that the rock broke away from the cliff about 1,000 feet above the road. The force of the impact pushed their Dodge Ram rental truck off the road and onto the embankment of the Merced River. About 500 feet of roadway was impacted by the rockfall.

National Park Service geologists were investigating the cause of the rockfall. The entrance road was closed Tuesday so park crews could clear it and make temporary repairs. It was reopened to the public on Wednesday afternoon.

Park geologists say that rockfalls are fairly common in Yosemite Valley due to the park's steep, glacier-carved cliffs. Most occur in the winter and early spring, during periods of intense rainfall, snow melt, and/or subfreezing temperatures, but large rock falls have also occurred during periods of warm, stable weather.

A massive rockfall from Glacier Point in October 2008 led the Park Service to permanently close 233 buildings in a portion of Curry Village due to the continuing danger of rockfalls.

In September 2017, massive slabs of rock peeled from the face of El Capitan and fell to the floor of the Yosemite Valley on two consecutive days. The first one killed a British citizen, 32-year-old Andrew Foster, of Wales.

Over the years, there have been several rockfalls along the El Portal Road that leads through the Arch Entrance of the park. In June 2017 roughly 4,000 tons of rock slid from the "Parkline Slab" cliff, about one mile east of the park boundary. In January of that year another rockfall closed the road for a while.

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