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US Investigators Probe Indian Couple's Fatal Fall From Yosemite Cliff

The tragedy took place on October 25, when a married couple from India living in the United States died after falling 800 feet in an area with steep terrain in California's Yosemite National Park. The couple maintained a website where they published stories about their travels to Paris, London, the Grand Canyon and Venice.
Sputnik

A spokeswoman for Yosemite National Park said that investigators still do not know how 29-year-old Vishnu Viswanath and 30-year-old Meenakshi Moorthy fell to their deaths last week from Taft Point, a scenic overlook located 3,500 feet above Yosemite Valley.

"We still don't have any clear idea exactly what happened. We are still trying to piece it together," Jamie Richards was quoted by the Mercury News as saying.

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Her remarks came after park rangers recovered the bodies of Viswanath and Moorthy from about 800 feet below Taft Point, where visitors are able to walk to the edge of a granite ledge which has no railing.

Yosemite National Park officials said that the couple were both born in India, but lived and worked in the United States. They recently moved from New York after Viswanath began to work as a systems engineer at Cisco in San Jose, California.

The two maintained a travel website called "Holidays and Happily Ever Afters," describing themselves as a "dream doer duo."

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Ironically, in a post the couple made last year on their Instagram account, Moorthy warned of the dangers related to people trying to take scenic photos from high places for their social media accounts.

"A lot of us including yours truly is a fan of daredevilry attempts of standing at the edge of cliffs and skyscrapers, but did you know that wind gusts can be FATAL?? Is our life just worth one photo?" she noted.

In a separate Instagram post, Moorthy urged travel enthusiast to "be careful standing at the edge of canyons/mountains/high rise buildings." She referred to the wind gusts, which she said "are extremely dangerous and your adrenaline rage is not worth your life."

Before the couple married in 2014, they graduated with degrees in computer science and engineering from the College of Engineering in South India.

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