While AI is constantly being promoted as tech make life easier, one teen learned the hard way that it can still lead to serious mistakes.
A 16-year-old solo hiker had to be rescued Saturday from a mountain near Vancouver after getting stranded while following a route he had planned with the help of AI, North Shore News reports.
North Shore Rescue volunteers received a call just before 3:30 p.m. about the teen, who was stuck on a cliff on Crown Mountain, roughly a 40-minute drive north of Vancouver.
Search manager Paul Markey told North Shore News that the teen had apparently used AI to plan his route up the mountain. The route was supposed to take him up Crown Mountain through a gully, a ditch carved by water and melting snow down a moutain slope, but he eventually ended up in steep rock-climbing terrain and became stranded at the base of a cliff.
“The boy was very scared. He definitely feared for his life,” Markey told the outlet.
The incident comes as AI companies are increasingly pushing users to incorporate the technology deeper into their everyday lives. Just this past month, both Meta and OpenAI have rolled out new AI agents that promise to handle various tasks for users, including sending emails, booking travel, and shopping.
But incidents like this show why it may not always be wise to trust AI to handle everything.
It’s also not the first time AI has gotten hikers into trouble. Three hikers on California’s Mount Shasta had to be rescued this summer after they said they relied heavily on Google’s Gemini to plan their trek’s logistics.
“They were advised by Gemini to bring far less food and water than their group required, especially when their planned 8 hour ascent became a multi-day ordeal,” the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office said at the time.
In the case of the teen in Canada, he set out from Grouse Mountain around 8 a.m. with plans to make his way up Crown Mountain, Markey told North Shore News.
“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,” North Shore Rescue wrote in a Facebook post.
Coincidentally, North Shore Rescue volunteers had been conducting a helicopter training exercise on Crown Mountain earlier that morning.
After getting the call, rescuers contacted the teen by phone and located him. Two rescue technicians were then lowered from a helicopter and hoisted him off the mountain. The rescue wrapped up shortly before 6:30 p.m.
“Be cautious when getting routes and information suggested through AI,” Markey told North Shore News. “You can’t just blindly follow what AI is proposing to you. You need to question the information and just see whether it makes sense or not.”
Instead, Markey recommends hikers use established mapping and navigation tools such as Gaia GPS, CalTopo or AllTrails.
It remains unclear which AI tool the teen used to plan his route.
