Is this the deadliest park in America?/Rebecca Latson

Grand Canyon National Park is the most dangerous U.S. national park, right? No, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the most dangerous. Wait a minute, the most dangerous unit of the National Park System is really Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

It's been said that, in cases of whether coffee, alcohol, and cinammon buns are good or bad for you, that if you wait long enough, there will be a study that lines up with your personal opinion. And that appears to be the case with the question of which unit of the National Park System is the most dangerous for visitors.

I say that because on Monday morning my inbox held a press release stating that "[A]n in-depth analysis of recent mortality data from national parks across the United States has uncovered significantly safety concerns, with Lake Mead National Recreation Area emerging as the most dangerous park, and drowning and motor vehicle crashes leading as the top cause of fatalities."

But...just three months ago another study claimed Grand Canyon and Wrangell-St. Elias tied for the most dangerous parks in America. And yet, another study was adamant that North Cascades National Park was the most dangerous.

Wait a minute. These personal injury trial lawyers claim that Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona is the most dangerous park. Huh? Backpacker Magazine says Denali National Park is the most dangerous, and that Virgin Islands National Park is the second-most dangerous.

Talking about "dangerous" national parks is so sexy that even The Street, a financial publication, weighed in, agreeing with those personal injury lawyers that Organ Pipe Cactus  is "the country's single deadliest national park."

Of course, Yellowstone National Park could explode to the top of the list with a larger hydrothermal explosion than the one that occurred recently in Biscuit Basin.

At the end of the day, it might all come down to how you're measuring the danger quotient of national parks. Does it hinge on the number of fatalities in a single year? The number of grizzly bears or white sharks? The steepness of its cliffs and the hundreds of feet of "air" between the cliff-top and the ground far below?

Should you take the number of fatalities in a single year and divide it into the total visitation for a park to come up with a per-capita danger level? That's what Backpacker did last year, and that might seem to be the right approach in determining which park your odds of dying are the highest. But even that calculation does not identify the "most dangerous" national park.

Before Backpacker Magazine's approach unnerves you and prompts you to scratch Denali off your to-do list, know that from 2010-2020 there were 52 deaths in Denali — roughly five per year — and climbing deaths can skew your interpretation of how "deadly" the park might be. After all, most visitors to Denali aren't trying to summit the park's lofty 20,310-foot icon, and those who do try to climb to the park's roof can greatly distort the park's "death rate."

To wit, in 2011 seven climbers died, in 2012 five. At least three climbers died on the mountain this year. Should those numbers really underscore how "deadly" Denali is?

No.

After all, it's not the national park setting that makes a park deadly. It's the visitors. As the National Park Service pointed out earlier this year, the greatest risk to your life in a national park is not a grizzly bear, not a rattlesnake, and not having a heart attack. The greatest risk to your life is being in a vehicle heading down the road.

Mortality data collected from the National Park System from 2014 through 2019 turned up 2,149 deaths overall, with 370 deaths related to driving. Drowning was responsible for 314 deaths during that time period, while hiking contributed 255 deaths, with falls accounting for 206 deaths, the Park Service says. There also were 381 suicides in the parks during those years, and 25 murders.

The takeaway, it seems, is that all these press releases trying to identify the "deadliest" national park are designed to draw attention to the company behind the interpretation, whether it's an outdoor company or a personal injury law firm.

Your own personal safety greatly depends on ensuring your brain isn't also "on vacation" when you visit a park.