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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.
I don't think things can be "marked as a path for legal reasons" unless you can explain that...
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.