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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...
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.