KallMeKris

And this is the part of this horrible case that resists any kind of narrative tidiness or real conclusion.

It is just simply what happened to four innocent people in a very hot place when the distance between where they were and where they needed to be turned out to be greater than what they had left to cover it with.

And I mean, hindsight's 20, 20, we can look back and say, why didn't they do this?

Or why didn't they do that?

But really putting yourself in their shoes, they made reasonable decisions.

Egbert made reasonable decisions.

And I think that's, what's so scary about it.

But luckily changes were made after this.

And since 1996, Death Valley National Park has made specific measurable changes to the way it communicates risk to backcountry visitors, changes that address precisely the failure points in this case.

And between 2020 and 2021, the park installed 31 new entrance signs at backcountry road access points across the park.

And in 1996, many of the junctions that the Rimkoos-Meyer family passed through were completely unmarked.

So the park now publishes explicit guidance that reads like a direct response to what happened to Egbert and his family.

Don't rely on maps alone.

If your vehicle breaks down, stay with it and mark it visibly for aircraft.

Most rental car agreements prohibit driving on unpaved roads.

And multilingual heat warning signs now appear at popular locations alongside advisories that medical helicopter evacuation becomes impossible when air temperatures exceed 115 degrees Fahrenheit because the air is too thin to support rotor lift.

And a daily road conditions report goes out each morning to every park contact point.

And there is now a dedicated page for real-time Death Valley road conditions.

And the park recommends that backcountry travelers carry satellite communication devices, which is technology that did not exist in any accessible form in 1996.

So whether any of these changes are sufficient is a completely different question, because every year someone still underestimates something and the death toll accumulates slowly one or two or three at a time in incidents that follow patterns that have by now become familiar.