They were on a year of adventure, together. It ended in a Yosemite rockslide.
A British climber killed Wednesday in a massive rockfall at El Capitan in Yosemite National Park was traveling with his wife on an anniversary “dream holiday,” according to British media.
Yosemite National Park identified the man Thursday as Andrew Foster, 32. The woman, who also was struck by the falling granite, was identified as his wife Lucy Foster, 28. She was airlifted to a hospital and is in critical condition.
Andrew Foster, originally from Cheltenham, England, and Lucy Foster, from Staffordshire, both went to university in Cardiff, according to the BBC. They were married in 2016 and on a “dream holiday” to Yosemite. The Fosters shared a love of climbing and outdoor adventure, reported The (UK) Telegraph, and had started a year of traveling together.
The pair detailed their travel plans in a blog and shared photos on Instagram.
Park spokesman Scott Gediman said the couple were not climbing when a huge sheet of granite sloughed off the iconic monolith. The couple were at the base of El Capitan when the rockfall occurred. Rescuers reached them within an hour and pulled them from the rubble, where they were trapped under a rock, Gediman said.
A preliminary estimate showed seven rockfalls from El Capitan’s southeast face occurred Wednesday, amounting to about 1,300 tons of granite. The largest was estimated to have been about 130 feet tall, 65 feet wide, and 3 to 10 feet thick. It fell from 650 feet above the base of El Capitan, or about 1,800 feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley.
On Thursday, a man was injured in another El Capitan rockfall, this one larger than Wednesday’s. It appeared to come from just above where the granite slipped off El Capitan’s face the day before, in the East Buttress area. Traffic was being cleared from a nearby meadow and visitors were gathering to watch as one helicopter hovered over the debris.
Jim Guy: 559-441-6339, @jimguy27
This story was originally published September 29, 2017 at 10:51 AM with the headline "They were on a year of adventure, together. It ended in a Yosemite rockslide.."