Indian couple dies after falling 800 feet in California’s Yosemite Park

TIL Desk/World/California/ In a tragic incident, an Indian couple died after falling 800 feet in an area with steep terrain in California’s Yosemite National Park this week, according to a media report. Vishnu Viswanath, 29, and Meenakshi Moorthy, 30, fell to their deaths from Taft Point in Yosemite National Park. They were identified on Monday as a married couple from India living in the United States.

The report said that the couple had recently moved from New York after Viswanath took a job as a systems engineer at Cisco, based in San Jose. Together, they chronicled their adventures of travelling around the world in a blog called ‘Holidays and HappilyEverAfters’. Rangers recovered their bodies on the steep terrain on Thursday below Taft Point, a popular tourist spot that offers spectacular views of the Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Falls, and El Capitan.

Visitors had spotted the bodies a day earlier. Park spokesman Jamie Richards was quoted as saying in the report that “We still do not know what caused them to fall. We’re trying to understand what happened. We may never know, (but) from everything we see, this was a tragic fall.” Richards said that so far 10 people have died in the park this year, and six of those park visitors fell to their deaths. In May, Asish Penugonda, a 29-year-old Indian national, fell to his death while ascending the park’s famous Half Dome trail.