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Accidents and Close Calls

Selfies and Mountain Hazards

American Alpine Institute
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Recently a video went viral of an individual trying to take a selfie at the edge of a cliff. The man fell off, tumbling over 130-feet.

Thankfully, he survived.

The Swiftest notes that that they compiled, “314 selfie-related incidents since March 2014 through June 2024. This database is a continuation of the Wikipedia selfie-related injuries and deaths database, which has largely stopped updating in the last couple of years.”

“These incidents in our database account for 425 selfie deaths and 82 injuries spanning 49 countries.”

2022 study published in the Journal of Travel Medicine, there were 379 selfie-related deaths worldwide between 2008 and 2021. According to Slate, “That’s more than 4 times the number of people who died by shark bite in the same period. And still that figure is likely an underestimate, because the numbers are pulled mostly from media reports, which don’t cover all deaths and can be hard for researchers to find.”

It is possible that this is the one of the largest new hazards in the mountains, people trying to get pictures of themselves…

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