BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK — A 35-year-old man from Florence, Texas, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on November 27 at the summit of Emory Peak, the highest point in Big Bend National Park.
“The entire park community is saddened by this loss,” Superintendent Anjna O’Connor said. “Our sympathy goes out to the individual’s family and friends.”
A group of hikers on the mountain called 911 — which routes to the park’s dispatch center — around 4 p.m. that day to report “a gunshot and a seriously injured visitor,” according to a park press release. Emory Peak, at 7,832 feet, is the pinnacle of a strenuous 5-mile hiking trail in the Chisos Mountains, a popular activity for visitors.
“It wasn’t a remote, all by yourself somewhere out in the backcountry type of incident. It was in a very public, iconic location within the park,” Chief of Interpretation and Visitor Services Tom VandenBerg said.
The difficult-to-reach location of the incident, and the fact that it was later in the day with nightfall fast approaching, presented some challenges for first responders. Because the park lacks its own helicopter, it relies on assistance from entities including U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to deploy helicopters out of Alpine.
“We really depend on the support from our partners, and sometimes they’re available and sometimes they’re not,” VandenBerg said. “It was a series of quick calls to them, and luckily we had people that were able to respond.”
Given the late hour, the only course of action, according to VandenBerg, was to place a park ranger at the location via helicopter so they could assess the area and remain with the body overnight before the individual could be recovered in the morning.
The body was transported to Alpine Memorial Funeral Home on Thursday. Investigating entities The National Park Service and DPS ruled the cause of death a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
VandenBerg said the tragedy at Emory Peak coincided with a massive water outage that impacted the entire Chisos Basin and with one of the park’s busiest times of the year — with over 1,000 people a day funnelling through the Panther Junction visitor center.
“Our sympathy goes out to the visitor and their family, can’t imagine what they’re going through,” VandenBerg said. “We are also really proud of our teams for coming together and responding like they did at a very busy time.”
The Thanksgiving week death marks the second suicide in the park this year. In March, an 80-year-old man from Alpine died by suicide on Grapevine Hills Road. VandenBerg said that frequency is “not unheard of,” considering park visitation remains high.
“As you get more and more visitors — we’re now well over 500,000 visitors a year — things like that tend to happen as well as you get more and more people coming,” VandenBerg said.
“It’s just something that we respond to as the National Park Service,” he added. “We’re here to take care of this place and to allow visitors to come and enjoy it. Unfortunately, things happen, and we respond to those things as we can.”
The mental health of first responders and park rangers — who live and work in an extremely isolated region with few behavioral healthcare resources — in the wake of such deaths is also of concern.
Following the suicide of the Alpine man in March, Deputy Superintendent Rick Gupman approached the Big Bend Regional Hospital District to request greater assistance with a long-term mental healthcare solution for park employees and for South County residents more broadly.
NPS employees are two hours from the nearest in-person mental health resources in Alpine, he said at the time, and limited to just six online therapy sessions under their insurance. While there has been no significant movement from the hospital district on the matter, Gupman has successfully partnered with the Warriors Research Institute, out of Baylor Scott and White in Waco, to establish a peer support program for park employees.
Gupman said there is no additional funding for this work, and the Warriors Research Institute is providing services for park employees for free. On Tuesday, two trauma psychologists from the institute — which focuses on serving first responders and veterans regarding “high intensity, critical incident” followup, per Gupman — were on their way down to the park, he said.
Following surveys of park employees earlier this year, the institute recommended the establishment of a peer support program, Gupman said. “Many of us are so transient that people move here, and they just don’t have a support network; their families are hundreds or thousands of miles away,” he said.
Ten park employees, including Gupman, were anonymously selected by their peers to become support specialists. The idea is that in the wake of a park tragedy, like the visitor suicide on Emory Peak last week, one of the 10 support specialist closest to a responding ranger will step in to open up a dialogue.
“We try and reach out to those individuals and do routine follow ups just to make sure that they’re doing okay, specifically the ranger that spent the night up on Emory Peak,” Gupman said. “I’ve done several casual follow ups saying, ‘How are you doing? Are you losing sleep? How is this impacting you?’ Just doing that very specific [check in]. That was an incredible, terrible, horrible thing that you had to endure. What’s it like? How are you doing with everything?”