Complex Numbers

Play It Where It Lies

Hell of a hazard.

A Woman Was Caught Whacking a Golf Ball into the Grand Canyon, and the Feds Aren’t Happy  
The latest story of a tourist behaving badly in a national park is a real head scratcher

Source is (shudder) Outside magazine. I still don't know why I keep reading their stuff.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my memories lives my long-forgotten teenager sensibilities. This is the version of myself that delighted in immature pranks, like toilet papering a classmate’s cottonwood trees and playing ding-dong ditch.

Both of which are annoying but relatively harmless. If no one was injured, a school wasn't evacuated, and nothing caught on fire, you were a goody-two-shoes.

I'm not admitting to anything, by the way. Just saying.

I’ll admit it: my teenaged self would absolutely understand the allure of whacking a golf ball off of the side of the Grand Canyon and watching it disappear into the chasm below.

Okay, so true story: they taught us the basics of golf in sophomore gym class in high school. As I recall, we split up into pairs and each pair got a golf club (don't ask me what its number was or whether it was iron or wood) and a wiffle ball the size of a regulation golf ball. The idea was to learn our swings and recover the ball easily.

I was paired up with the class stoner, who, with a level of perception and intelligence only displayed by a high school stoner, found the one real ball in the box of wiffles. One of each pair of students teed up, and on the coach's command, wound up and swung.

Everyone else's ball caught a bit of air and then dropped down to bounce sadly on the grass. Ours, however, made a perfect golf-ball arc through the air and ended up 300 yards downrange.

Coach got up in our faces. "WAS THAT A REAL BALL?"

Stoner nodded. (Like anyone could have done that with a wiffle.)

"YOU GO GET THAT RIGHT NOW."

So we trudged through the bushes. As soon as we were out of sight, my teammate produced a joint from his pocket and sparked it.

Like I said, perceptive and intelligent.

As I recall, we did find the ball, and both got lousy grades in that gym class. Which was the only class my parents didn't care what grade I got in, so it all worked out for everyone involved. Coach got to get in someone's face; stoner got to get high in class; and I got a story.

Anyway. The relevant thing is that, while I certainly got up to some shady shit in high school, I don't think I ever considered whacking a golf ball off the rim of the Grand Canyon. For one thing, it's 2100 miles away. For another, I don't play golf (it generally requires being *shudder* outside).

On Thursday, National Park Service officials posted an update on the Grand Canyon’s official Facebook page about a woman who filmed herself hitting a golf ball into the canyon, which she then uploaded to TikTok. In the video, the woman also loses the grip on a golf club and flings it off the cliffside.

If it wasn't recorded and posted on social media, it didn't happen.

Now, look. The problem with lofting a golf ball into the Grand Canyon isn't that it might hit someone. The chance of that is infinitesimally small, though admittedly if it did happen the consequences would be terrible. No, it's that it might inspire other people to do it. TokTik trends are a thing, and I can definitely see the "Grand Canyon Hole In One Challenge" going viral. With that many balls flying through the air, the chance of hitting someone increases significantly... as does the amount of litter, which is the real problem here. (The article does mention all this later).

Officials acted swiftly, and with the help of the general public, were able to track down the woman.

Snitches.

At Outside, we come across a litany of stories of people behaving badly in the outdoors, and this year has been a busy one.

More reasons not to go into the outdoors.

There were the high schoolers who booted a football off of Colorado’s Uncompaghre Peak...

Touchdown!

...the dudes who were photographed scrawling graffiti in chalk on a rock at the Grand Canyon...

At least it was chalk and not spray paint?

...and the never-ending march of tourists getting too close to animals at Yellowstone National Park.

Those, I have mixed feelings about. I mean, it might injure the poor animal if it attacks and kills the stupid human, but other than that, it only harms the stupid human. So while it's true that one shouldn't get cuddly with a Yellowstone grizzly, bison, unicorn, or whatever they have out there in the wilderness, the penalty is built right in.

Article doesn't mention my favorite Yellowstone idiocy, which is people who see the pretty pools of azure water and decide to go off the very clearly marked trail festooned with danger signs and warnings (you can't tell me what to do! mah freedumz! stoopid government!) to take a dip. Some of those pools are near boiling and have a pH of like 1.5. Here's someone   of whom nothing was left but a foot.

I mean, that sort of thing is just par for the course.