A hiker is lucky to be alive after following a fake trail on Google Maps | Hacker News Reader

A hiker is lucky to be alive after following a fake trail on Google Maps

backpacker.com

45 pointsJimmc41434 comments

>> For starters, figuring out where you are with a map and compass takes skill in the best circumstances—

Indeed it does. I grew up hiking in mountains and acquired this skill (thanks boy scouts). We would regularly traverse mountains which had no trails around all. Or go from here to there making use of some trails, and some free walking. Understanding contours, water, vegetation comes with training and experience.

Hiking is also a peculiar sport. It's very safe to the prepared, but can be very dangerous in unexpected ways to the inexperienced. The barrier to entry is basically zero, and with phones/GPS gets ever lower.

Outcomes when things go wrong are usually OK. Wrong clothing, getting lost, you might get cold, hungry and tired. But mostly it's inconsequential. Until you get unlucky in the mix. Then the penalty for failure can be death.

Of course a bit of training covers a lot of ground. Scouts did a lot of that, not least I suppose because we were all kids who tend to make bad decisions. Proper footware, warm clothing, spare water and food, and most of all the ability to recognise when things are bad to Stop, hunker down, and wait for better weather or help.

My recommendation is that if you want to go hiking, join a club or find some training on how to Be Prepared (tips hat) and how to manage increasing danger levels.

>> Until you get unlucky in the mix. Then the penalty for failure can be death.

Totally agree. I suspect everyone who hikes for long enough can think of at least one instance where they are glad they weren't "unlucky" that day.

Tech executives gone hiking: "If you haven't been close to dying on the trail you're not taking enough risks"

I always find it odd when people say you should have a paper map, or a low tech way of making fire, or something like that.

People always frame it as "Old tech is better", but having the skill to actually use it seems like the important part.

I doubt I'd know what to do with a paper map in an emergency, but I do know that I probably shouldn't go to places where lack of skill or equipment is likely to kill me.

Low tech fire tools are pretty straightforward. Paper map is better than no map at all if your phone dies.

It's better in that if say your phone fails, it makes a good fall-back position.

Of course if you can't read a map (and that's a learned skill) or use a compass, then having that kit is of marginal usefulness.

Carrying a little "survival kit" , lighter, compass, map, survival bag (basically a big plastic bag that you can sleep in), pen-knife etc is a really good idea. Weighs very little, and can quite literally save your life.

Having both a map and a phone is obviously better than just a phone, but having only a paper map seems like a pretty bad idea unless you're a real expert.

I don't drive and rarely do more than "You can still hear traffic" stuff, but I do have some first aid stuff, a multi tool, an arc lighter(Since I need one anyway for heat sealing webbing and the like), and an emergency blanket.

But I have no business going anywhere where actually needing any of it is likely, without actually having the appropriate skills.

Great advice at the end of the article, "put unknown trails to the sniff test: If they peter out into forest or unmarked desert, or you find yourself unexpectedly scrambling up steep or loose terrain, stop."

Every one of these "person almost (or does) dies because their GPS led them astray" stories seems like it could have been avoided if people followed that advice. I really do wonder why they don't? I've been hiking a lot and taken some wrong trails and I do know the feeling of, "it probably gets better just around the next corner," but I also have managed to decide to turn around and try again another day when a "trail" gets too difficult, thankfully. It just makes me wonder

Seems like you answered your own question; either they didn't get that advice, haven't "been hiking a lot" (or at all), or just feel like they can brute force it for some reason.

Hiking is one of the first activities in which I learned the value of reps, as a discrete type of practice. If you go hiking once, you learn something about what you've brought with you, the conditions, different kinds of surfaces, and your own (current) physical ability, if you're paying attention. Do that many times with a little variation between each adventure, and you'll develop a generalization intuition that you can't get in any other way, including about advice itself for a given area, altitude, climate, time of year, etc..

Now that I've been a hiker for years, and continue varying my adventures—usually in the specific mountain range and trails these people were rescued from—I tend to think of different ground surfaces as a metaphor for life.

Incidentally, a lot of people probably don't anticipate completely losing cell reception so close to the city.

It's just a part of human psychology, once you've decided to do something it can result in tunnel vision where obvious indications that something is wrong get ignored. It can sometimes be hard to take a step back and re-evaluate.

We've long observed the same thing in airplane pilots. When they get takeoff clearance they can get so focused on getting the plane into the air that obvious signals of deteriorating conditions during takeoff get ignored. The Tenerife accident is just one example of this.

It seems like this could stop you from enjoying a lot of trails. I hiked in Pukaskwa and lake superior provincial parks last year, and the trails at many points became quite steep/rocky. But they were overwhelmingly fun & beautiful hikes. I did lose the trail twice which was quite startling and was glad to have gps on my phone.

Oh don't worry, when this happens I always go back to my maps and then make another attempt.

I've actually been a victim of something similar. Visiting a state park I followed a random popular trail I found on All trails. It turns out it was popular because it took rock climbers to the face of a rock wall up a steep sketchy slope. By the time I looked behind me I realized I was in "slip and hopefully not die" territory. In retrospective it's funny how much faith I put in the All trails map and trudged on before I had the wherewithal to turn around. As someone with a lot of hiking experience it was a humbling lesson to learn. It also didn't help that I have experience rock climbing, I think I was on auto pilot while scrambling, which probably would have made others pause sooner.

Did you not read the reviews?

It’s ironic that the volunteer rescue organization, North Shore Rescue, is raising an alarm about potentially dangerous information on Google by posting on Facebook.

Because both Google and Facebook are unaccountable private companies that might be difficult for some users to access and might not respond to attempts to correct false information.

North Shore Rescue even has its own website at NorthShoreRescue.com, but still chooses to only use Facebook in this emergency situation, unfortunately.

Edit: North Shore Rescue is a volunteer organization, but is partly government-funded

Yet the alert has made it here, proving it was effectively distributed. Go to where the people are.

Can you access their Facebook page? I cannot. Facebook demands that I create an account to read it.

I have no problem with going where the people are. But I think this is backwards. The information should be somewhere public, with links to it posted on FB, X, NextDoor, or whatever closed platform has a chunk of your audience.

It's a fair callout, seems like they must have either decided upon or been sold a gigantic full screen background video, and reporting on specific instances somehow didn't make it into the requirements for that website.

Edit: Actually I changed my mind on this, as a search and rescue organization, there's probably 2 main messages to get across to anyone visiting their website; how to contact them, and what it might be like to volunteer. I do think it would be good to have some kind of publication mechanism, but it's possible that's too much overhead.

I do a lot of cycling in the central Cascade mountains in Washington. If there's a line on a map, there may or may not be a road in reality. If there's a road, there may or may not be a corresponding line on the map. That applies to both paper maps and electronic maps.

New logging roads are built, and old logging roads are abandoned, so the forest reclaims them. If you're following a road or trail, sometimes it gradually becomes more overgrown, to the point where it's nearly impassable.

You always have to use your own judgement, and look for signs that other people have recently traveled on the same road or trail. You also have to use your own judgement when it's time to turn around.

It seems crazy to me to blindly trust Google Maps and follow it wherever it leads you. But I suppose some people haven't yet experienced the disconnect between maps and reality, and assume that the map is always right. It's better to learn that lesson in more harmless situations.

I used to blindly rely on google maps until it misdirected me on my way to Redwood National Park. It led me to a house in the mountains that had a sign saying something like - google maps has misdirected you and there is no path through this house to the Redwood national park. It was a place where even the cellphone did not work. This happened ~6 years ago and hopefully google fixed it by now.

They probably haven't and even if they have there's probably some other bogus data in there.

A lot of these maps will have a couple 'tells' added, things that don't really exist to say that if a set of things was copied it came from a different place.

Really sucks when you happen to need to go somewhere you haven't been before, that's actually where that place is next to. Yes, that does happen. E.G. when relatives and friends live on private roads in the middle of nowhere.

Yep “paper cities” is what to google if you’re interested. We have a “paper bus route” in my neighborhood at bus stops that were removed 10 years ago, that serve the same purpose, as far as I can tell.

Similar story. Was in a caravan with friends on a road trip and apple maps had us going onto a dirt road to save time. We go overlanding a lot, so dirt roads aren't weird, but we decided to stop and double check before proceeding too far on the road.

About a minute later, a border control agent pulls up next to us and starts with the standard interrogation. Turns out, apple maps had been telling people to use a dirt road to circumvent a border control checkpoint - which according to the officer was a felony. We proceeded back onto the pavement and through the checkpoint where they waved us through. The dirt road wouldn't have been faster at all, so it was puzzling why it was giving those directions.

One possibility that occurs to me is that various people might have reported the border checkpoint to Apple Maps as a blockage in the past, in order to get it to give them a route around it.

Not that this absolves Apple, of course, since they should absolutely be checking these things better.

In my country, using Google Maps is nuts, hell, the official 1:50000 topomaps can often have errors - tracks marked on the wrong side of a creek, tracks marked that are only passable with a chainsaw these days etc.

You'll never beat local knowledge. Go to the ranger station or visitor centre or hell, the local bar.

I once went deep into the forest on a large network of fire roads, riding my street legal dirt bike. No big deal, I had a smart phone with offline maps and two methods to charge it!

Then the the crazy rain and wind came. Soaked the phone (2015 era cheaper android). Soaked the charge port and even the back cover in general. Phone powered off.

I was soaked. And very cold. And had to navigate from memory at several turns that I hadn't even been paying attention at (who does when they have nav!). I was so cold I had to stop several times and warm up my hands by holding my soaked gloves against my exhaust system and almost steaming the gloves warm for a few minutes.

I'm a lot more careful now.

This is most certainly a backcountry ski trail, given the close proximity to a ski resort.

It’s much, much easier to navigate the mountains when all the rock, skree, and brambles are covered in a meter or two of snow.

Where does Google Maps get its trail information? Near me, I saw a several mile long trail on national park land that I couldn't find on any other trails site including the national park website. I explored the trail; it exists, has signs, and even a name but good luck finding any information about it other than that squiggle on Google Maps.

In Czechia there is the awesome Czech Hiking Markers System, used since 19th century (it has since spread to other, mostly European countries). No GPS needed, sometimes not even a map, because it is being constantly maintained by volunteers from Czech Tourist Club [1] who make sure the trail markers are visible and the trail is safe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Hiking_Markers_System

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Tourist_Club

In the UK, it's not possible for Ordnance Survey to remove bridleways (horse tracks) from maps for legal reasons. Unfortunately, this means that some are no dangerous for passage despite being explicitly marked on the map. One example: mountain rescue involved in recovery of horses neck-deep in bog/marsh on Dartmoor.

I had an AC guy come to my house and Google Maps somehow got my location wrong. I live in a single-family house that shows up as clear as day on Google and Apple maps, but he showed me and somehow it messed up.

Google maps frequently gets tripped up by even simple things in the city, it deserves a lot of skepticism in the mountains.

You learn quickly that if it doesn't seem like an actual road or trail - it probably isn't.

16 years since Dunder Mifflin Infinity.

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