A mother and son who unraveled a geographic hoax
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
A few replies to some good questions:
1. Per @JdeBD, that was the Wikipedia edit that started everything. After 30+ hrs of online research, all roads lead back to this edit. I read 3 books on the island and found no mention of the boulder.
2. I took a bunch of photos that didn't make the article. Happy to share them offline with interested parties, but given that I could not find MB, they don't prove much.
3. The article does focus on us getting lost but that happened well after we left Ryan Island. This confused the NPR reporter too. Ryan Island is pretty easy to get to from Malone bay which is just a water taxi away from Rock Harbor. We had a working GPS with us the whole time which made certain legs of the trip a lot easier. How did we get lost with a GPS? The island is a mix of clearly marked dirt trails and large rock fields with no trail markings. You need to have a great sense of direction and some luck to pick up the trail again after traversing each rock field. We got lost after what must have been a quarter-mile rock field at 1am and the GPS didn't have the hiking trail marked in that area.
4. We made 2 landings at different points on Ryan Island, one southern and the other west / north-western. I did a lot of bushwacking from both points but there was no evidence of any water on the island or even mud where there could have been a "seasonal" pool. I was looking for a clearing or any kind of large flat-ish area but couldn't find anything like that larger than a few feet in diameter. The (small) island is extremely rocky and densely wooded.
5. Re the route, as many have noted it was very convoluted. We originally planned to go 18 miles in a day - the first half mostly paddles and portages, the second half is an 11-mile coastal trail back to Rock Harbor. The plan was to abandon the canoe at the halfway point and come back and get it via water taxi the next morning. After getting lost we gave up at the halfway point around 4am and camped for the night there.
In your research, were you able to find GPS coordinates of the purported island? I'd be interested in taking a trip out to search myself, but doing a grid search of the whole island sounds challenging based on your report.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is an affiliate of MIT. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory is an affiliate of UChicago.
If someone says "that didn't happen there!" you can always say "oh sorry, I meant the other one"
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=dd84f18f-fcc7-41a3-89b2-f49db...
On the one hand, the boulder has always seemed fishy to me. It's a remote location and I doubt many people would track something that small, or care enough about it to know about the seasonal changes at that boulder. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me geologically, although it's possible. I also years ago remember people familiar with the site jokingly talking about how "if there were a boulder there..." which lent the whole thing a sense of fiction when I started reading about it. It was easy to see how a humorous fantasy could change into folk legend and then into documentation.
On the other hand, where are the photos? Where's the meticulous documentation? To trek all the way there to address this and then not take copious photos to share with the media?
They also got lost, which adds to my skepticism they even made it there, or were sure they did. Can you get lost there? I suppose -- there are a ton of islands and things there so I can see that -- but the area is blanketed with topo map coverage, and you've got GPS now. If someone were to get lost there, I'd question whether or not they even got to where they wanted to begin with. Siskiwit Lake is a fairly large feature on Isle Royale, and the nesting doll nature of the goal makes your target hard to miss.
In short, I wouldn't be surprised if the boulder isn't there (or isn't surrounded by water). However, I also wouldn't be surprised if this guy and his mother never actually went to where they claimed to go.
They got a water taxi to the bay on Isle Royale that was close to Siskiwit Lake and then portaged their canoe to the lake. (Which is indeed fairly close.)
Then:
>After canoeing back from Ryan Island, mother and son got well and truly lost. At some point during their 18 miles of hiking, they lost the trail.
Where did the canoe go? Why wouldn't they have been being picked up and returned the same way they got there? There's lots of mention of GPS coordinates. Yet this story doesn't bother to mention that, I don't know, they got lost because both of their phones ran out of juice? (Because the story seems to take place well after the time when most people had smartphones and they were clearly using GPS in some form.)
(Or at least very poorly told and edited)
I frequently canoe and camp around northern Minnesota and Lake Superior. I do not understand how they could have possibly traveled a total of 18 miles from Malone Bay to Ryan Island, as the article states. At most, it would be a 1 mile portage and a 5 mile paddle. Getting lost and adding 12 miles seems very unlikely, as you mention, due to all the navigable landmarks in Siskiwit Lake. And that's ignoring GPS.
My guess is that they are not strong paddlers and/or navigators, got to the island already tired, saw the amount of bushwacking that would be required to explore the island, and bailed.
For the record, I think this is really cool. Something about the story, as presented, doesn't sit right though.
[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/48.00956/-88.76993&lay...
>After canoeing back from Ryan Island, mother and son got well and truly lost. At some point during their 18 miles of hiking, they lost the trail. In their genuine terror—it was, by then, the middle of the night—they realized that their best shot was to find the coastline, since following that was guaranteed, eventually, to get them back to the lodge. Finally, they found the park ranger’s house, and had no choice but to knock on his door until he woke up. They didn’t know it, but they were still 10 miles from the lodge, and would have missed their flight off of the island had they not been driven back.
It looks like a 1/4 mile portage and maybe 1 1/2 mile paddle to Ryan Island from Malone Bay.
They were taken by a water taxi to Malone Bay. Why would they be walking back to the lodge without their canoe?
Assume that, for some reason, they were walking back and were going to come back for their canoe later. Seems an odd plan but let's go with it. Why would a park ranger have a house somewhere 10 miles away from the lodge (which puts it at pretty much the opposite end of the island).
But to hike 18 miles to Daisy Farm? Certainly they would have had to drop off the canoe. And "canoeing back from Ryan Island" to me says they did drop off the canoe. My guess is they dropped it off and tried to hike back to the lodge on foot (which would be a long hike) and got turned around.
The problem is the trail from Malone Bay goes the wrong way. It would be more likely for them to portage from Ryan Island to Chippewa Harbor or Lake Richie campground, drop off the canoe at that campground, and then attempt the hike back. The mileage from there is close.
Another reason why I think they ended up at Daisy Farm is that it says "their best shot was to find the coastline since following that was guaranteed". Following the the wild coast of Isle Royale in the dark is a suicide mission. However, the trail from Daisy Farm to Rock Harbor does follow the coast. In fact its one of the only trails on that side of the park that does.
My guess is they didn't get off the trail and into the wilderness at all, they just took a wrong turn onto a different trail and decided to take whatever trail they ended up on to Daisy Farm and then head to the Lodge. At which point they bugged the campsite director.
I also agree it's obvious they did not go onto Ryan Island. They even had GPS coordinates of where to go. No doubt they would have bushwhacked to take a picture if they did go. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe they not only didn't bushwhack then, they also didn't do it on their hike back in the middle of the night. IE, they stayed on marked trials the whole time.
Lots of strange embellishments in this story.
> DICKEY: We hiked in as far as we could to try to find the center of the island, was unable to find Moose Flats or Moose Boulder. Who knows; it could have been there, but highly unlikely.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815546895/the-lonely-non-isla...
The article reads like they didn't even look for the boulder itself. Just that they made a brief visit to the island before turning around.
The "proving it was a hoax" part seems entirely down to the lack of available evidence that could be found before the trip was undertaken. The trip itself seems separate from that.
While not a completely useless metric, it's also not a completely reliable metric either.
With having this thought, I have doubled down on trying to stay out of things I'm not personally knowledgeable about. For me, this means trying even harder to stay out of most kinds of political discussions, which frequently boil down to gossip and name calling and deciding which "people" you want to be seen as and who you want to be for and who you want to be against.
Political discussion tends to not be about good policy and what kinds of policies we want to have and why. And I have concluded I honestly don't know enough in most cases to have any idea which candidate I should be talking trash about or whatever. And it all too often ends up a case of me parroting sentiments of acquaintances just to try to connect socially.
I wonder how much that's true for other people/"in general." And I wonder if we need to revisit how politics gets done and revise our de facto use of popularity contests now that you are so unlikely to meet people you are voting for or know someone who actually met them and we are reliant on Facebook and what not, which has proven to be very much game-able.
The degree to which modern politics so often looks to me like the plot from "Wag the dog" is pretty disturbing.
Which isn't actually intended to take this into the direction of politics. It's just to say that rubrics of social proof that were probably more reliable when the world was a smaller place have gone weird places in the internet age and we maybe need to think about that more than we do and try to find solutions.
Medicine seems especially reliant on the social proof angle, but a lot of science is over the heads of a lot of readers and we basically latch onto experts we respect to help us decide which statements we don't understand but will essentially take on faith.
There is little punishment for being a steadfast communist/capitalist/whatever for your entire life.
Religion is a great example of this. I have yet to see proof of a god.
There are blind people. There are deaf people.
Failure by one person to sense a thing others sense isn't actually evidence it isn't real.
I long ago decided this is probably the best explanation for the divide between those who believe in some kind of God or spiritual force and those who think that's clearly Hokum.
Edited for typos, possibly due to autocorrect, aka autocorrupt, the bane of my online communication efforts.
I'm saying different people have different perceptions (which includes mental models or thought processes) and relate differently to reality around them. It's usually a pretty pointless thing to argue about. Both sides are generally pretty adamant about their views, a la The elephant and the six blind men.
I have yet to see a demonstration of divine intervention.
He was told growing up that he didn't have to believe, but he absolutely wasn't allowed to be derisive of his own mother and her beliefs -- or anyone else's, for that matter.
We were homeless for years and had quite a few bizarre experiences that could be interpreted as "miracles" or "divine intervention" if one is inclined that way. He occasionally would comment on that fact and observe that his belief system was being tested or mocked by life, then follow that observation with remarks about laws of large numbers and that really bizarre coincidences were bound to happen at times to someone.
People in both camps tend to see what they already believe in, kind of like the observation in The Sixth Sense about dead people only seeing what they want to see.
Please understand that I'm absolutely not suggesting you are wrong. I'm only suggesting that the status of being a believer or non believer seems to be self reinforcing.
Believers and non believers can experience the exact same thing and can both conclude at the end of the day that their current beliefs have been verified -- or at least not overturned.
(My position is that it's a simulation in 4D and the actual answer neither matters nor can be proven one way or the other.
I think people should be free to believe what they believe in that regard. I also think they should, ideally, respect the right of others to do the same.)
Your observation gets run through my current set of beliefs and just reinforces my already existing opinion that, seriously, "Live and let live" is the best policy for such things. ;)
Who or what created the universe?
Don't say "big bang" because something needed to create that.
We don't yet have answers to every question.
The average person is up against a well paid army of influencers (PR, marketing, advertising) who's tools of subversion are becoming exceedingly advanced and complex.
Studies I have seen and first-hand experience suggests that people in positions of power are typically fairly competent and got to where they are because of their competence, so they often genuinely feel that people disagreeing with their position are just stupid or simply don't understand the problem adequately. Their first-hand experience backs up this assumption in most cases and fosters habits that end up de facto being "asshole behavior" in many situations.
As they accrue power, they get surrounded by yes men who massage their ego, either to curry favor or out of genuine fear or because they are sincere fans who recognize their leader's competence and aren't competent enough themselves to poke holes in anything their leader says.
It's inherently hard to figure out how to avoid that outcome. Powerful people often keep long-standing associations with people who knew them back in the day because those people may be the only ones who have any hope of giving them pushback that is actually constructive and not politically motivated (in an "office politics" sense of the word).
The world hasn't solved this problem yet.
For example, you could ask 10 people on the street if they would like to get rid of corruption in government and most (probably all) would say emphatically "yes". I don't know how we translate that into action though and deal with the spin and whirlwind news cycle.
But I'm not actually interested in discussing politics in this thread. I'm interested in social phenomenon, which politics happens to be a good example of.
Edit: Though I will go on record as saying I am not for mandatory voting. I have mostly not voted in my life because I have been overwhelmed by events and I am not comfortable randomly picking names at random when that act helps determine who holds positions of very real power in the world. I don't think forcing people like me to pick random names at random in any way improves anything in the world.
If you're working 2 jobs and barely making rent and voting is on a work day miles away... then OK. But if it's just "I can't be bothered to learn a little bit about really important shit" then you get to shoulder responsibility for your elected officials whether you like it or not.
My plate is quite full, thank you. I wish my problems were as relatively minor as "I work two jobs." That requires a level of good health and energy I have never had and would have killed me had I ever tried it.
I stand by my opinion that it's amazingly stupid for the world to insist that everyone must give their opinion, even those who have extremely uninformed opinions for reasons largely beyond their control.
If people want to vote in spite of not doing a lot of research, I think that's fine. But please don't make me vote against my will.
Personal comment. That's really rough, and make me feel pretty damn privileged. Kudos to you for putting in the extremely hard work!
Food for thought:
For the first 35 years of my life, I was called lazy.
For the last almost 19 years, my problem has been called a genetic disorder instead.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/288109348
You can see how it was falsely sourced by adding it in front of the source that does indeed confirm (it being a re-hash of Shelton's earlier book The Life of Isle Royale, published in 1975) that Siskwit Lake is oligotrophic, but says nothing in support of the added material.
> TAUB: Since we have published the story, we've heard from a reader who claims that Moose Boulder does, in fact, exist and that when the park reopens this summer, they're going to go out there and take pictures and send it back to us to prove. And, you know, that would be awesome.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815546895/the-lonely-non-isla...
There's really no point in his travels other than personal satisfaction. That people can be motivated by things like this helps me to relax, and I hope more people learn to enjoy these simple things as well.
There is no purpose to life. But you need one to be happy/thrive/survive. So pick a purpose and go for it. Any purpose will do, just choose.
Under the resource system, players could gather raw materials, like ore, and make them into finished goods, like armor, which, once used, would begin to break down and reënter the pool as raw materials. Players, it turned out, liked to make things—they were turning out hundreds, and even thousands, of swords and shields and gauntlets—but instead of using them, or throwing them out, which would have had the same effect, they hoarded them. One player reportedly had a collection of ten thousand identical shirts.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/05/28/pimps-and-drag...
A collection of ten thousand identical shirts. Yet there are times in my life when I could have certainly appreciated the therapeutic benefit, if not higher purpose, in coming home from the office and spending all evening folding t-shirts in a virtual castle.
IIUC, you're advocating hedonism as a sufficient purpose for some lives. I think for many people, the possibility of hedonism as the greatest possible good causes them existential dread.
Caveat: I've studied far less philosophy than I should have; I may be talking out my backside.
To me--also with little philosophical study--"hedonism" refers to just pleasure. It's the sugar of life.
But I've gotten the greatest satisfaction in life from things other than sex/drugs/booze/games/etc. From creating new things, solving problems, and helping others. This is the protein of life.
1) There is no God, as in a conscious being who created the universe for a purpose that is yet to be revealed to us
1B) The universe itself is uncaring, and it's current state is just the resolution of a very complex set of causes and effects. It's on a path, but there is no destination or goal.
2) There is no afterlife. Existence is consciousness, and when consciousness nds, there is nothing else.
3) Consciousness may or may not be special but it is irrelevant because we EXPERIENCE it as special.
4) Experiences and feelings are real, complex, evolving, and almost limitless in the range that you can experience over the course of a finite lifetime
5) Positive/unique experiences are inherently good to have. And good to provide to others.
6) Therefore, the only thing we can do is try to maximize the amount of positive feelings/experiences we each have, and maximize the amount we generate in others.
7) The exact balance between focusing on yourself vs generating in others, and the relative worth of being a force multiplier (e.g. sacrificing your own happiness for someone else, or multiple others), is an exercise left to the reader. So long as your actions contribute to a NET good for the world, it's probably okay.
8) What I don't like about the term hedonism is it makes it seem like I want to just sit around eating grapes and having sex. In a more macro sense, technology that helps humanity be more effective and have more leisure, a more egalitarian society, a multi-planetary civilization that is safe from extinction from a wild cosmic event are all things that I believe are of value to contribute to the overall increase of one's happiness/experiences, and to all of civilization. So my philosophy, whatever it is called, is completely compatible with humanity's progress
[1]: https://gigster.com/
Wonder how many other Wikipedia entries have a similar provenance?
We know that maps deliberately contain copyright traps. Is this done with other reference material? How would we know?
Yes. Per Wikipedia "The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of water, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea."
Regardless, whether it's the largest or not isn't really the point, it's just that it sounds interesting. I believe Manitoulin island (which is a bigger island in a smaller lake) has a similar island-lake recursion pattern. If you start looking at islands (not necessarily the largest ones), there are also several lake-island recursions (Lake Taal on Luzon island being one). And then one could rank the size of the recursive islands (or lakes) at the various levels. It's a lot like trainspotting in the end.
I'm sure more passes from different angles would get a better picture as well.
What do you mean "doesn't work"?
Example of how it works for me: https://share.getcloudapp.com/qGuob6D0
I picked a photo of a journalist at random. It identified her.
I might be mistaken though.
It's also a bit strange how they lost track of where they were in relation to the lodge. They didn't have phones with them? Even if you were foolish enough to go hiking without an offline mapping app you can still get from point A to point B.
I've had to give people paper copies of maps more than once when hiking because their batteries were flat on their phones.
NB I take a phone, an external battery pack and two copies of paper maps.
Edit: As an aside, I'm trying to reduce my reliance on digital maps and go back to using paper maps and compass more as I'm sure it reduces awareness of where you are (I've actually made more navigational mistakes using digital maps than when I mostly used paper maps).
Also, a good orienteering course will teach you how to actually find your way around, which can come in quite handy.
It might be possible that the 'n' shapped formation on the north east part of the island could flood enough in spring to form a short lived 'pond'.