<\/p>\n
From the Grand Canyon to the California coast, Meenakshi Moorthy and Vishnu Viswanath documented a life of travel and natural beauty in their adopted homeland for more than 10,000 Instagram followers.<\/p>\n
The pair had immigrated to Silicon Valley from India. Moorthy described herself as the \u201chigh-spirited storyteller\u201d who penned their social-media entries. Viswanath, she said, was the \u201chead photographer of our most pretty pics.\u201d Posting online was about more than just receiving \u201clikes,\u201d she often remarked. And she warned about the dangers of scaling high places just for photographs.<\/p>\n
Last week, the couple\u2019s bodies were discovered after tourists came across their abandoned camera equipment at the top of Taft Point, a granite outcropping 1,000 feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley. It is unclear whether the couple died while taking a selfie, as has been reported \u2013 though it would not be the first time that has happened in the park.<\/p>\n
Although in posts Moorthy described herself as \u201ca fan of daredevilry\u201d and an \u201cadrenaline junky,\u201d friends and family said the married couple were usually very cautious.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of us including yours truly is a fan of daredevilry attempts of standing at the edge of cliffs and skyscrapers, but did you know that wind gusts can be FATAL???\u201d Moorthy wrote on a post with a photo of her sitting on a cliff overlooking the Grand Canyon. \u201cIs our life just worth one photo?\u201d<\/p>\n
Viswanath and Moorthy met while they were both studying in the western Indian state of Kerala. Viswanath had wanted to be a doctor or an engineer. \u201cHe used to be a chess player and loved maths,\u201d his brother Jishnu remembers.<\/p>\n
Like many young Indians, Vishnu was drawn to software engineering \u2013 and the promise it held of a lucrative career overseas. After graduating, he and Moorthy, by then his girlfriend, moved to Illinois so that he could study at Bradley University.<\/p>\n
Chris Nikolopoulos, a professor there, instructed Viswanath in artificial intelligence and later hired him as a research assistant. He said Viswanath was one of the brightest young programmers he\u2019d encountered in 30 years of teaching. \u201cHe had a very dynamic personality and a very active mind,\u201d Nikolopoulos said. \u201cHe was the kind of person who could have changed the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
An expert in big data and AI, Viswanath had recently landed a job at Cisco. A friend, Mageshwaran Mohan, said that since Moorthy wasn\u2019t permitted to work after accompanying Viswanath to the U.S., she threw her energy into blogging.<\/p>\n
The couple launched their latest blog and Instagram account, titled \u201cHolidays and Happily Ever Afters,\u201d last year, describing it as: \u201cThe happy place where wishful wanderlust meets vistas of positivity.\u201d Moorthy\u2019s effusively upbeat posts, sprinkled with happy-face emojis, rainbows and unicorn references, were complemented by Viswanath\u2019s colorful photographs, in which Moorthy was unmistakable thanks to her bright-pink hair.<\/p>\n
One friend, Ameena Badarudeen, said that Moorthy had written to her: \u201cThe world has soooo many beautiful places out there and I feel we have soo little time to see them all.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Moorthy posted about the wonders of discovering new places, she also acknowledged the difficulties of the couple\u2019s mobile lifestyle. She mentioned the hardships of finding an apartment in New York and then packing all the couple\u2019s boxes for the move to California.<\/p>\n
Sometimes she stopped posting for months, then mentioned the dark times she had experienced, and promoted an internet campaign to \u201c#stopthestigma\u201d of mental illness. \u201cThere are days in my life\u2026when unicorns sparkling in rainbow glitter are dancing around me and still I am buried in my blanket for weeks together hurting in a whirl of hopeless dark thoughts,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
Their friend Mohan said that, despite the ups and downs that come with immigrating to a new country, the couple felt like they were living a dream. \u201cThey were loving what they were doing,\u201d he said. \u201cShe loved the fall colors and the snow, which we had never seen before in India. Even I am sad sometimes because I can\u2019t go back and see my parents. But they were happy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The circumstances of their death are under investigation. Sean Matteson, a visitor who was at Taft Point on the night of the couple\u2019s deaths, realized that he had unintentionally captured Moorthy in a photo he took of himself and a friend. She appeared to be closer to the edge than any other tourist.<\/p>\n
Initially Viswanath\u2019s brother, Vishnu, was widely reported to have said that the couple were taking a selfie when they died. But in an interview with the Guardian this week he said that was not strictly true. They had set up a camera separately, he said; he had not meant to imply that the couple fell as they were holding up a camera in their hands.<\/p>\n
In any event, selfies have been blamed for numerous deaths in Yosemite. In September, an 18-year-old Israeli man, Tomer Frankfurter, fell from an 800-foot cliff and died while taking one. In 2011, three young people died while trying to get pictures of Yosemite\u2019s Vernal Falls.<\/p>\n
A recent study documented 259 deaths worldwide caused by people taking selfies \u2013 dubbed \u201cselficides\u201d by the researchers \u2013 between October 2011 and November 2017. The vast majority of victims were young people aged between 10 and 29. The most common causes of death were drowning, transport accidents and falls from high places.<\/p>\n
The deaths of Viswanath and Moorthy pierce the benign image of U.S. national parks, which remain wild and sometimes unforgiving places despite their record popularity. According to a 2017 analysis by Outside magazine, just over 1,000 people died in U.S. national parks between 2006 and 2016, excluding suicides.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople might be deciding \u2018Do I want to go to Disney World or on a cruise or to a national park?\u2019 \u201d said Graham Ottley, the general manager of Southern Yosemite Mountain Guides, a private guiding company. And, for people who are used to being in very regulated settings with guard rails and smooth pathways, \u201cit may not be clear what is a safe place and what is an unsafe place.\u201d<\/p>\n
For those close to the couple, recent events still have an air of unreality. Nikolopoulos, the professor, said that \u201cit is hard to believe\u201d Viswanath died over something as trivial as a photograph. \u201cThey are still investigating, but who knows what happened. Maybe a deer or a bear came along.\u201d He is looking into starting a scholarship program for graduate students in Viswanath\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
Jishnu, Viswanath\u2019s brother, said that Viswanath and Moorthy had been planning to return to India at the start of next year for a wedding. He remembers his brother as \u201can amazing person, almost perfect in every aspect.\u201d And he remembers the bond the couple shared. \u201cThey loved each other like no one has loved anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n
This story was published as part of a two-year series by The Guardian, This Land is Your Land, examining the threats facing America\u2019s public lands, with support from the Society of Environmental Journalists.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A recent study documented 259 fatalities worldwide caused by people taking selfies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[2748],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-97213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-climbing"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97213"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=97213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}