Indian couple falls to death 800 feet in California's Yosemite National Park

An Indian couple living in the US fell to their deaths 800 feet in an area with steep terrain in California’s Yosemite National Park last week, according to a media report.

Identified as Vishnu Viswanath, 29, and Minaxi Moorthy, 30, the married couple fell from Taft Point in Yosemite National Park, a popular tourist spot that offers spectacular views of the Yosemite Valley, Yosemite Falls, and El Capitan, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.               

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The report said that the couple had recently moved from New York after Viswanath took a job as a systems engineer at Cisco, based in San Jose. Rangers recovered their bodies on the steep terrain on Thursday, while visitors had spotted the bodies a day earlier.

Park spokesman Jamie Richards was quoted as saying in the report that “we still do not know what caused them to fall. We’re trying to understand what happened. We may never know, (but) from everything we see, this was a tragic fall.” It is being investigated as to how the couple fell or what had occurred when the accident happened.

Earlier, the National Park Service had said in a statement that the recovery operation for a male and female visitor who had died in the fall from Taft Point was completed on the afternoon of October 25. The department said the two people fell approximately 800 feet below Taft Point in an area with very steep terrain.

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This recovery operation involved Park Rangers using technical climbing and rappelling techniques, in addition to helicopter support from the California Highway Patrol for a short-haul operation. 

The report added that the couple had been married since 2014 and both were software engineers. On the cover of Viswanath’s Facebook page is a picture of the two of them smiling on the edge of a cliff at the Grand Canyon.