Trekking the Grand Canyon for Google Maps

This is something that I don't see Apple ever doing on their own. I don't think you'll ever see a blue shirt sporting genius with weird looking camera headgear trekking around the Grand Canyon.

But, maybe they'll buy a company who would? What do you guys think?

P.S. I'm not an Apple hater at all, writing this with a Macbook Air, Cinema Display, iPhone 5, and an iPad on my desk. But I do feel like as far as this much dedication to their mapping service, it's not going to happen.

I've been waiting for this! I'd love to volunteer in order to get trails around my town on the map. Even better would be to accept user-submitted street-view data, and open the backpack design. Maybe a backpack rental program even?

I'm torn between enthusiasm for these awesome additions to to Google Maps, and the longterm effect on one's sense of wonder at the vastness of the world.

Something of the wonder of hiking into the Grand Canyon is lost when you can walk it in Google Maps. Some of the mystery is gone. Oddly enough, that's part of the reason satellite maps are so engaging, and have far less of this effect: you're getting a perspective that you would never otherwise have, and thus nothing's particularly lost. If anything, browsing around Google Earth is an invitation to explore. Walking the Grand Canyon on Streetview...that's an invitation to second guess making the effort. Or worse, spend countless hours comparing streetviews of different trails to see which is better.

That last point might be the worst: previewing trails and outdoor experiences just accelerates the paradox of choice problem, as you are constantly comparing what you see beforehand to what you see in real life to what you also saw elsewhere digitally.

Does anyone know if it's possible to sign-up to trek with their kit for them to map out other remote places?

Just a decade ago, this would have made a fine April Fool's Day joke from Google but now it seems like the obvious next step. After this, I can imagine live web-cams on busy intersections or frequently changing views (construction sites like 1 WTC) being integrated into the street-view so you can see updates in real-time. Or quad-copters roaming around updating the views much faster than ground-based cameras.

The great barrier reef, Grand Canyon, and snow mountains, the street view needs to be renamed. It is very exciting, the street view technology is turning into something more. They are now on path to capture rest of the planet's surface. It seems like a fun future where we can zoom google earth to anywhere on planet and keep zooming and it goes to street view, everywhere. Awesome.

I feel like Google has went too far with their maps. They've always claimed "Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." However with their maps, they're actually _creating_ the worlds information and making it accessible and useful.

What do I mean by creating it? Well, can you get these trails as public domain data?

If you want to volunteer to get trails onto a map, use www.openstreetmap.org. (And you'll run into the same problems with the accuracy of GPS signals in canyons.)

I'm not looking forward to the time when I try to find the Pacific Coast Trail and the result comes back with ads for backpacks and boots.

Wanted to point out that the Alt+Left key gets broken on their page and you either have to do a Backspace or just click Back.

What'll be really cool is being able to walk parts of the earth 50 years from now when all of this stuff is historical.

It'll be interesting to see how the navigation will work from an end-user perspective...I imagine it's a relatively easy job to interpolate the position of the camera along hard-coded coordinates of a street.

...though I guess the Google MAps user could be confined to the exact path that the trekkers chart in their walk. It'll be interesting to see how tight winding curves are handled through the nav interface.