Death, Daring and Disaster: Search and Rescue in the National Parks

by Charles R. "Butch" Farabee, Jr.

Death, Daring, and Disaster is an encyclopedic history drawn from the nearly 150,000 search and rescue missions carried out by the National Park Service since Yellowstone was established as the first national park in 1872. Presented in digest form, these brief but enthralling accounts include such calamities as that of a publicity-seeking adventurer who parachuted onto Devil's Tower in 1940 with no planned way off, the collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon in 1956, a last-second rescue of a little boy trapped beside his dead parents in a plane buried by a Sierra blizzard, the fate of fifty men aboard a World War II-era Russian freighter being shredded to pieces on the rocks off the Olympic coast, the perilous recovery of a victim of unrequited love at the heart of an active Hawaiian volcano, and the saga of a jet pilot who bailed out over Kings Canyon in 1956 and literally crawled out six weeks later.

Charles R. "Butch" Farabee, Jr., currently Assistant Superintendent at Glacier National Park, has personally participated in nearly 1,000 search and rescue missions. As the National Park Service's first National Emergency Services Coordinator, he was responsible for program coordination involving search and rescue, emergency medical service, SCUBA, and aviation teams.

Butch Farabee has captured the essence in search and rescue-the danger, excitement, disappointment and sadness-but most often the thrill of saving a life against tremendous odds.
-Russ Dickenson, Former Director of the National Park Service

I cannot think of a more credible person to write a book on search and rescue. Butch Farabee has done it all, from "grunt" to "boss" to "teacher."
-Mike Finlely, Superintendent, Yellowstone National Park

Death, Daring and Disaster: Search and Rescue in the National Parks is published by The Roberts Rinehart Publishing Group, ISBN 1-57098-202-3 paperback $19.95, 512 pages. .

Visit the Yellowstone Association Bookstore (Western History) to purchase this book

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