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Hiker rescued off B.C. cliffside after taking non-existent Google Maps trail
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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I hope I'm never in this situation but you cannot blame a map, you need to use your own judgment when following a route.
I've been there though. Bike tour with my girlfriend. Weather report is fine, road is marked clearly on map.
Caught in a torrential thunderstorm at the top of the mountain, road down to the hotel is blocked off since last month but its not visible anywhere online.
We take a side trail marked on the map. Google says its there, OSMAnd says its there. It technically is there, but it clearly hasn't been maintained in years, and it is clearly not bikeable, but we have no other alternative to get down the mountain (other than go back the way we came through the storm).
Cue to us carrying our bikes down a steep "path" (read: vertical border of some farmer's field, so marked as a path for legal reasons) under a quickly darkening sky. The village below is reachable, we just have to survive the drop. No turning back, tensions are high, the bulls in the field next to us are eyeing us warily, and who knows how friendly they are.
We make it down by the skin of our teeth, onto a real road, cycle the next 30km to the hotel, and eat a victory pizza. That pizza, to this day, sticks out in my mind as the most tastiest meal I've ever had.
Nice. These are the moments we feel truly alive
It was also a nice bonding moment between my gf and I. Up to that point I had no idea how she would react in a crisis; suffice to say she took note of the situation, remained cool as a cucumber under my silent but visible duress, and did her part without complaining, only voicing her concerns after we made it out. Keeper.
Awesome. My wife was a total city girl ( and a bit anxious about life in general i.e. white knuckles on an airplane), one of our first dates I took her to a park with trails. She wanted to take a less travelled path, I explained it would get quite bush-wacky. we got 80% in and she started to freak out about slugs and the bramble like shrubs. She wanted to turn back. I explained it was a loop and I knew the parking lot was 20ft ahead, and going back would mean way more bugs and branches. Hearing that she was having a crisis and wanted me to call the fire department to extricate us. I'm like hear that traffic, we are on the opposite side of the ditch that runs along the road we came in on. Like if we busted through the tree line we would be at the road. So she calmed a bit, we kept going and got to the car. She was in tears. Almost a decade later she is full on nature now; Enjoys trails and swimming in lakes that used to freak her out because "you don't know what's down there". . Took a lot of reassurance from trail loop till now. But this year she went Skydiving.
wow, she really got into it - that's a huge character development!
I still can't believe it actually.
100%. Relationships tempered in fire early on really help dealing with other crisis down the road, to say nothing of the day-to-day issues that pop up.
Source: Similar thing happened to us and we’ve been married almost two decades and are still going strong. We are each other’s ride-or-die bitches and best friends.
Glad to hear it :-)
I've been there too even with Alltrails in urban areas. Trails are overgrown deer trails at best and there are overgrown long ago. Dead reckoning was the only way out.
I don't think things can be "marked as a path for legal reasons" unless you can explain that...
Depends entirely on the state/country, but some places have a law where a plot of land that is surrounded by other plots of land must always have some kind of accessible path to it, in the case that the surrounding plots develop around it and box it in, leaving no route for the landowner to actually reach it. Cyprus, for example is such a country where they do this. Germany, where this trek took place, probably has similar laws(?)
I actually don't know, but that is what was going through my mind when I thought "who would mark this as a public access path?"
Thanks for that response. The more you know.
I don't know about the "marked... for legal reasons" part, but there are officially surveyed road allowances all over the place that have no actual roads or have "roads" that are impassable except with the right vehicle in the right conditions.
I live in rural Saskatchewan and my work as a school bus driver and my interactions with the municipality mean that I can point out lots of bad mapping. The official bus route mapping that comes from head office always has to be amended because it seems that they do not have the data to distinguish between all-season maintained gravel, seasonally maintained dirt, unmaintained path, and road allowances that a farmer is permitted to seed or a rancher is permitted to fence off. Google and others just lump them all together when displaying or routing.
Glad you guys made it down safely!
Seems like taking the blocked off road would have been the much smarter option. Or, even smarter, just come back the way you came.
Oh we tried, but we were stopped by two construction workers sitting in the car. The road ahead had literally been raized.
What about the way you came?
Back through a storm that almost drowned us? No way. It was a possibility sure, but not one we could mentally do again.
Lol this ain’t the army. Just use the word kilometer. Or are metric units a taboo to say out loud
I thought it sounded more concise and casual, but fair enough, I'm not military. Will change.
Plenty of people fuck up using their own judgement. Hiking can be dangerous. You assume that if something is on googlemaps, it is somehow vetted and/or "commonly used", otherwise why would googlemaps even have a path in the forest/mountain.
I don't know if other people do this, but sometimes they can be a bit of a way-marker.
"Oh, coming from this way, it will be the third house after the trail" -getting directions to a friend's house
"When I pass this trail, I know I'm halfway there"- during a long car trip
They should just put an icon or a pin instead of laying out the trail. It would stop a lot of the questions about liability, and more people would hopefully look elsewhere for the trail details and hazards. It's crazy how often gps-related deaths happen.
"It'll get better soon I'm sure"