The picture shows a pink haired Meenakshi Moorthy, 30, gazing at the horizon from the northern rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. She is seen sitting on the edge of a cliff and watching the sun set. This was Meenakshi and husband Vishnu Vishwanath's Instagram post on March 28. On Thursday, the couple's bodies were recovered by park rangers after they had fallen approximately 800 feet below 'Taft Point,' a cliff in California's Yosemite National Park which offers stunning views of the surrounding valley and the falls.
Although the reason for their fall is yet to be determined, the couple was known to post daring cliffside pictures, both on their Instagram account and travel blog, Holidays and HappilyEverAfters. In Instagram posts to their 12.9K followers, they had tragically written about the dangers of strong wind gusts at great heights, 'daredevilry' and 'doitforthegram' on multiple occasions.
"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?" according to the post written on March 28, 2018.
In another post from November 16, 2017, where she is seen standing on the edge of a precipice at the Grand Canyon Northern Rim, the caption reads, "Please be careful standing at the edge of canyons/mountains/high rise buildings. The wind gusts are extremely dangerous, and your adrenaline rage is not worth your life. We waited quite a bit and made sure of this.”
Though the exact time and date of the couple's fall is not clear, trekkers had noticed their bodies on Wednesday, October 25, before it was recovered from a steep terrain under the cliff.
Jamie Richards, the park's spokesperson, reportedly said that it would be hard to determine the exact cause of their fall. “We’re trying to understand what happened. We may never know, [but] from everything we see, this was a tragic fall,” he said.
Meenakshi and Vishnu met when they studied together at the College of Engineering in Chengannur, Kerala. The couple married in 2014 and later moved to New York. Six months ago, they relocated to California where Vishnu took up a job as Cisco systems in San Jose. The travel-loving couple ran a blog, which was mostly written by Meenakshi, where she described herself as having an “insatiable wanderlust” and being “obsessed with all the beauty this planet beholds.” She also described herself as an “adrenaline junkie” who is not scared of “roller coasters and sky diving.”