It is not clear whether immediate first aid might have altered this unfortunate outcome.....


Yellowstone National Park (ID,MT,WY)
Yellowstone Visitor Killed By Falling Tree

A 36-year old man from Taiwan was killed by a falling tree on Monday afternoon June 9th. He was part of a small family group hiking the Fairy Falls trail, which is north of the Old Faithful area.

The man had left the trail and ascended a nearby tree-covered slope in an apparent attempt to get a better view of Grand Prismatic Spring, when a lodgepole pine tree fell and struck him in the head. Visitors who witnessed the incident made their way back to the trailhead, about a half mile from the accident. They encountered two park maintenance employees working in the area, who relayed the information to Yellowstone law enforcement rangers via radio.

Rangers/Paramedics immediately responded and found that the man had sustained a serious head wound and that he was bleeding profusely. A life flight was ordered up and was en route while rangers provided ALS interventions, placed the man into a wheeled litter, then moved him to the life flight landing zone. Just as the helicopter landed, his condition deteriorated, and attempts to revive him failed. He was declared dead at the scene.

Rangers and a NPS Coroner are continuing to investigate. Responders reported windy weather conditions in the area at the time. The fallen tree had been a standing, dead lodgepole, fire-killed during the park’s 1988 fires. Ranger/Paramedic Dennis Lojko was the incident commander.

Poor guy. Did they state why the tree fell? High winds, lightening strikes or other reasons?

Very sad. A freak accident to be sure. Just goes to show you're never 100% safe anywhere.

This is just speculation on my part, but I suspect first aid might not have made much difference. While head wounds can bleed profusely, that (external) bleeding is usually not enough to be life threatening, in and of itself. Bleeding inside the skull ("closed head trauma"), however, can kill one fast. The pressure from bleeding inside the skull squishes the brain. Not much can be done about that in the field. A Helo evac to a neurosurgeon was the right call, but time was not on the victims side. Again, this is just speculation on my part.

The note would suggest wind:

"Rangers and a NPS Coroner are continuing to investigate. Responders reported windy weather conditions in the area at the time. The fallen tree had been a standing, dead lodgepole, fire-killed during the park’s 1988 fires. Ranger/Paramedic Dennis Lojko was the incident commander."

There is a reason old dead snags are sometimes called "widow makers".

This sort of incident was actually a infrequent, but still fairly common, occurrence in Panama. At the Jungle Operations Training Center there were quite a few casualties over the years where trees, or just limbs, fell on soldiers. We lost three in one incident in the late 1980s. The trouble there was that the soil was not very deep, and there was a bedrock of hard ancient coral under it. When the soil was saturated the large trees just lost their hold. There were also many insect species that weakened large limbs, causing them to fall. It was not such a freak accident there, unfortunately.

When static at a campsite, the excellent JungleCraft site has a video in which the proprietor uses an extra Dyneema ridgeline to provide at least some (chance of) protection from a falling branch. Nothing is guaranteed but I can see where stringing up a few of these lines would offer some degree of minimizing the impact.

i was back in a camp that i had been in a few years before and when i walked over the the "just right" tent spot i found this snag driven into the ground.it must of hit hard as you can see the top end busted off next to it.

if you follow the link it's to a long story about a couple who had a tree fall and pin them in their tent.
i have camped on Tiger Bay several times!

http://www.bwca.cc/diaries/closecall.htm

recently, near Yosemite.