On a cross-country bike trip in 1977, college roommates Terri Jentz and Avra Goldman were asleep in their tent in an Oregon park when they were run over by a pickup truck and attacked by its ax-wielding driver. Both women were badly injured, but survived the assault. Their attacker was never found. “Far too often, women are prey in our culture. And there are more guys than we’d like to admit who go out in the wilderness to hunt them,” was Jentz’s guess on what happened, as quoted by Kathryn Miles in her new book, “Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders” (Algonquin Books).National Park Service (NPS) statistics reveal 330 deaths per year on the 85,000,000 acres of the country’s 423 sites — about one per million out of 300 million yearly visitors. More than half are accidental — mostly drownings, falls or car accidents, although there are the more gruesome freak occurrences, including accidental decapitations and scalding deaths in thermal pools. The purposeful deaths are more than 95% suicide.
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