In Canada, a 16-year-old needed to be air-rescued after following AI-planned hiking route onto 'Widowmaker'

A 16-year-old hiking alone in British Columbia showed the limits of AI trip planning. After using artificial intelligence to map a route up Crown Mountain, he got trapped on a cliff along a climbing route called the "Widowmaker" before rescue crews lifted him out.

According to North Shore News , rescuers got a call just before 3:30 p.m. about a teen stranded on Crown Mountain, roughly a 40-minute drive north of Vancouver.

Search manager Paul Markey said the hiker started from Grouse Mountain at about 8 a.m. and planned to reach Crown Mountain through a gully but instead wound up in steep climbing terrain below a cliff.

"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 .

The post continued: "The two rescue techs were inserted above the subjects' location, as the subject was too close to the vertical wall (i.e., lacking the necessary helicopter rotor clearance to deliver the techs to his exact location). When on the ground, the crew established an anchor and one member was belayed to the subject. There, the member established additional protection and was able to move the subject to a suitable extraction point."

He was then hoisted off the mountain, and the mission ended shortly before 6:30 p.m.

"The boy was very scared. He definitely feared for his life," Markey told North Shore News.

In a similar instance on California's Mount Shasta, three hikers had to be rescued after relying on Google's Gemini to plan their trip, ABC News reported. "They were advised by Gemini to bring far less food and water than their group required, especially when their planned eight-hour ascent became a multiday ordeal," the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office said.

Recently, Meta and OpenAI introduced new AI agents, pitching them as tools for tasks such as travel booking and shopping.

Markey said hikers should use familiar route-planning apps such as Gaia GPS, CalTopo, or AllTrails instead of AI directions. North Shore News did not identify which AI tool the teen used.

By chance, North Shore Rescue volunteers were on Crown Mountain doing helicopter training.

"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."

AI use can go badly wrong in nature and other high-stakes settings, though it can be useful as well.

• Veteran forager Alan Bergo warned that AI can cause life-threatening effects in the wild.

• Google users said a dangerous response on lug-nut torque showed how bad AI advice can be.

• At Cambridge University, engineers built a crucial landslide-detection tool for disasters.

• Scientists are using AI to predict weather patterns such as El Niño earlier.

• Google's FireSat looks to detect wildfires rapidly so first responders can move faster.

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