A traveling couple who blogged their experiences plummeted to their death recently while attempted to capture the moment.
Unfortunately their search ended last week at Yosemite National Park, where the breathtaking landscape of craggy granite cliffs and thundering waterfalls caused them to throw caution to the wind while posing dangerously thousands of feet atop a cliff, resulting in their untimely demise.
Details below…Viswanath, 29, and Moorthy, 30, were identified by park officials Monday as the two people who died last week after falling from Taft Point, a popular overlook that towers 3,500 feet above Yosemite Valley.
The overall consensus is that the couple were attempting to capture a photo before falling to their deaths.
A number of photos from their social media show Moorthy posing near the edge of sharp cliffs, no guardrails in sight.
Moorthy was a free-spirited Harry Potter fan who dyed her hair pink and ominously warned people on social media about the dangers of falling from cliffs and tall buildings while trying to take spectacular photos.
Viswanath was a software engineer at Cisco Systems, and photographer who accompanied her on adventures all over the world, filling social media and a travel website they ran with stories from Paris, London, the Grand Canyon and Venice.
According to a news release from the National Park Service that announced the recovery of their bodies, the young married couple, both born in India but living and working in the Bay Area, fell about 800 feet “in an area with very steep terrain.” During the recovery process, park rangers had to use “technical climbing and rappelling techniques” and a helicopter, the release said.
The high school sweethearts who wed in 2014 ran a travel blog called “Holidays & HappilyEverAfters” and had resided in New York until recently moving to California. Ironically, one of their final posts warned of the dangers of seeking the “perfect” travel selfie:
When we squirm at another selfie attempt gone south 😱 from a skyscraper, let?s remember to save that in our core memory 🧠 and not the memory dump 🛢(I am still on the Inside Out 🎬 train y’all 😬) Same applies when we get our knickers in a twist and hog a spot till we get the perfect shot🙄 I know I know, I am guilty as charged for all of this 🤦♀️ and if I didn?t have Mr. Two Goody Shoes, Vishnu 🤭 with me, I am not even sure if I would have written this post.
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Let us all try to be responsible digital citizens and use our ?numbers? to be transparent and honest, shall we?🤗 None of us is perfect and the more we accept it and share our flaws as much as our wins, we are one step closer to creating a sane social media without the scary brouhahas.💕✨
There are hard lessons to be learned from other’s failures. No photo is worth your life.