AI Routed a 16-Year-Old Up Crown Mountain. He Ended Up on a Climb Called the Widowmaker.

A 16-year-old set off from Grouse Mountain at 8 a.m. on Saturday with a route up Crown Mountain that an AI tool had planned for him. The route was supposed to go up a gully. It put him into steep, technical rock-climbing terrain instead, and by mid-afternoon he was stopped at the base of a cliff with no way up and no safe way down. North Shore Rescue got the call just before 3:30 p.m.

The climbing route he had ended up on is called the Widowmaker. "It turns out that this hiker had somehow got far off the Crown hiking route (we are unclear exactly how/where) and became stranded on a climbing route known as the 'Widowmaker', at the base of its final headwall," the volunteer team said. Two rescue technicians were lowered from a helicopter, hoisted him into the aircraft, and flew him to a base near Cleveland Dam. The operation finished shortly before 6:30 p.m.

Search manager Paul Markey put the stakes plainly: "It put him into a situation which was beyond his abilities, so things could have gone sideways pretty quickly." He also described what the crew found when they got to him. "The boy was very scared. He definitely feared for his life."

He had a working phone, and that is how they found him. North Shore Rescue called him to pin down exactly where he was, which on a face like that is the difference between a hoist and a long search.

A gully on paper, a 5.9 on the ground

Crown Mountain has a hiking route. It also has roped climbing on it. On a map those can sit a short distance apart. On the mountain, one of them needs a rope, a partner, and gear, and that is the one a solo teenager walked into believing he was in a gully.

The name on that route is not decoration. In September 2017, according to CBC's reporting at the time, a climber attempting the Widowmaker Arete fell roughly 75 metres after four pieces of his placed protection pulled out, and he died. His partner, belaying from a ledge below him, suffered severe burns trying to grab the running rope and stop the fall. North Shore Rescue recovered the body.

Nobody has said which AI it was

The tool has not been identified. The failure is not specific to one product anyway. Ask a language model for a route up a mountain and it returns text with the shape and the confidence of a trail description, assembled out of words about mountains rather than out of the mountain. It is the same mechanism that produces court citations for cases nobody ever filed. A fake citation gets caught by a clerk. A fake gully gets caught by a helicopter.

Use these instead

Markey named three: Gaia GPS, CalTopo, and AllTrails. All three are built on topographic maps and on tracks from people who went up and came back, so a line in one of them is a line somebody walked rather than a line that reads well.

Markey stopped short of telling people to avoid chatbots altogether. He wants the output questioned before anyone acts on it. "Be cautious when getting routes and information suggested through AI," he said, and "you can't just blindly follow what AI is proposing to you. You need to question the information."

The second one of these this year

In September the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office in California put Google's Gemini near the top of what went wrong for three hikers from Roseville on Mount Shasta. Gemini had helped plan the trip, and the sheriff's office said it told them to carry far less food and water than the group needed. They summited around 7 p.m., about seven hours past the standard turnaround time on that route, lost the way down in the dark, and spent the night out before Forest Service climbing rangers reached them and walked them off.

North Shore Rescue has been doing this since 1965 and runs about 130 calls a year on volunteers. This one went from a phone call just before 3:30 p.m. to a helicopter at Cleveland Dam just before 6:30. Plan the route in Gaia GPS or CalTopo before you leave the parking lot, and if a chatbot gave you the route, check it against a real map before you go.

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