The two people who fell to their deaths from a popular overlook in California’s Yosemite National Park were a married couple from India who were living and working in the United States, officials said.
Park rangers recovered the bodies of 29-year-old Vishnu Viswanath and 30-year-old Meenakshi Moorthy from about 800 feet below Taft Point, where visitors can walk to the edge of a vertigo-inducing granite ledge that doesn’t have a railing.
“Yosemite National Park continues to investigate this case, which will take several weeks,” park officials wrote in a news release Monday.
The couple graduated from the College of Engineering in Chengannur in 2006 in computer science and engineering.
They loved travelling and maintained a website called “Holidays and Happily Ever Afters” about their travel adventures, and described themselves as a “dream doer duo.” Meenakshi describes herself as the one “diagnosed with the curious case of interminable travel bug”
The Mercury News called Meenakshi “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.”
The couple’s social media pages and their travel website is full of chronicles of their travel from all over the world.
It was not clear how the couple fell or what they were doing when the accident occurred. A friend of the couple said they were on a driving trip from New York and were seeing the sights in California at the time.
The San Francisco Chronicle writes the couple had recently moved from New York after Viswanath took a job as a systems engineer at Cisco Systems Inc., based in San Jose, according to a friend.
BBC.com reports the latest deaths come just one week after a photo of the Taft Point lookout went viral, when a photographer captured a wedding proposal amidst the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada mountains.