PARK ACCIDENTS Deaths, injuries, rescues

McConnells Mill State Park has a beautiful, natural gorge with a white water river running through it. It’s a hiker’s or a kayaker’s paradise, but people have been lost, seriously hurt and even killed in the park. Accidents that have made the news over the past eight years:

July 2006: A 34-year-old woman was injured in a fall from Breakneck Bridge.

October 2004: An Ellwood City couple suffered serious injuries after they and their three dogs fell off a boulder near the grist mill.

May 2004: A 17-year-old girl was critically hurt after a fall near the Kildoo Falls. The girl was hiking with her boyfriend and they left the regular trail. She was walking ahead of her boyfriend when she turned to speak to him and fell about 32 feet in an area between Kildoo Bridge and the Slippery Rock Creek. The park manager told The Vindicator another person had fallen in that same spot six years before.

April 2001: Two firefighters drowned in the river while trying to retrieve the body of a 23-year-old Slippery Rock University student. The man had drowned after his kayak overturned and he was trapped.

October 2000: Two rappellers, a 21-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man, were hurt after they fell about 32 feet because of equipment failure in the cliff area just off Rim Road.

September 2000: Two Ellwood City area girls, 18 and 17, became lost after dark on the Alpha Pass near Hell’s Hollow. Their parents reported them missing, and rescue crews were called out. Two state troopers walked the trail until they found the sobbing girls at about 3 a.m. They had begun their hike late, at 7 p.m., and had wandered off the trail. They were cold and tired, but unhurt.

April 2000:A 17-year-old Zelienople, Pa., girl broke her arm after falling 30 to 40 feet into the Slippery Rock Creek, and her friend was hurt when she wrecked her car into a tree after going for help. The girls had been climbing on rocks just south of Breakneck Falls. Firefighters used a rope rescue system to get the stranded girl out of the gorge. Neither girl was critically hurt.

Source: Vindicator files