The Guardian is breathlessly (can the written word be breathless?) reporting a story about a 16 year old lad that found himself stuck on a cliff on Crown Mountain in Vancouver’s North Shore Mountains. The young lad (Bryce), who was well equipped with extra food, clothing and a headlamp (a surprisingly well equipped 16 year old in other words) had used AI (specifically Claude) to plot a route from the top of the Grouse Mountain gondola to the summit of Crown Mountain. According to news reports, Bryce managed to veer off the standard scramble route climbed by hundreds of people every year (the North Shore Mountains are very accessible from the nearby and heavily populated metropolitan area of Vancouver, population around three million) onto the multi-pitch rock climbing route known as Widowmaker Arete. Widowmaker Arete ascends the northeast buttress while the standard scramble route ascends the south ridge of Crown Mountain.
The big reason this story has made headlines in the Southern Hemisphere is, of course, the fact that the young lad used AI for his route description. Our overlords, whose penchant for panic is only exceeded by their desire for control, have also jo that there is a “greater than 10% chance the technology [AI] could kill all humans in the next decade.” If this has a bit of a Job (not job, Job, pronounced with an e) feel about it that could be because within the last half decade we have had the COVID panic, the monkeypox panic, the first iteration of the bird flu panic (when eggs became scarce because the authorities killed all the chickens), the AI panic, and now we are back again with another bird flu panic. In betwixt all this, we have had the minor Russia pneumonia panic and the possibility of Ebola spreading (the latter would actually be disastrous). If at first you don’t succeed try, try, and try again appears to be the mantra of our increasingly malleable media.
But people getting off-route and into trouble is nothing new. In 2005, Doug and I took the ferry across Howe Sound to the Woodfibre plant. This was a paper and pulp mill that shut down in 2006 but was still running on a skeleton staff in 2005. We had gone to climb Mount Sedgwick. This took us two days. Our first day involved a six kilometre logging road walk, followed by a steep, rocky, rooty, narrow and somewhat precarious foot pad to deep snow (it was June) which we post-holed through until we finally found a bit of snow free ground for camp after 1500 metres of elevation gain with still a goodly distance remaining to the top of Mount Sedgwick. It rained all night but we did continue to the summit of Sedgwick the next morning (in wet conditions and thick fog) and walked back out to the ferry in the afternoon.
The most interesting and surprising encounter I have ever had with anyone in the backcountry happened on this trip. We first met this chap – who I dubbed “Survivor Man” - on our way up to our campsite. He was hunkered down in an old watchman’s hut at Henrietta Lake (dammed in the 1940’s to provide fresh water for Woodfibre). We managed to escape a long conversation with him on our first day out as we were keen to press on to camp with rain threatening and a long way to go to camp.
However, on our way back out, about a kilometre from the ferry terminus we caught up with Survivor Man who was also walking out to catch the ferry. Survivor Man was carrying a hard shell Samsonite case and had only one functional shoe. On his shoeless foot he had wrapped a strap around his ankle to hold a small duffle bag in place as a quasi-functional “shoe.” This was topped with a plastic bag. Although we whizzed past him with a quick hello – it’s not hard to walk faster than someone with only one shoe carrying a large Samsonite case – we did spend 45 minutes conversing with him at the ferry terminus as we had all missed the previous ferry by 15 minutes.
I present, for your edification, the highlights of our conversation in point form:
He was recently back in Canada after teaching English in China;
He had been out for ten days with the intention of crossing the spine of the range – a mix of heavily forested and remote mountainous terrain – to eventually arrive at the small coastal community of Sechelt. This is a very long and trackless distance which has likely never been done. Even pre-colonisation, the First Nations people would not bash up and over the spine of the range.
The only navigational aid he had for this endeavour was a “Backroads” map book. These map books had no contours or other information and were essentially just a street directory of logging roads. I should add that he didn’t actually have the Backroads book, he had a black and white photocopy of ONE page of the book!
He had no tent, sleeping bag or sleeping pad, but he did carry a tarp. Bear in mind that above about 1300 metres, there was continuous and deep snow.
His shoe had been irrevocably burnt whilst sleeping next to a fire when he knocked his shoe into the fire in his sleep.
He was also without socks as he had used his cooking pot over an open flame to dry them and had accidentally melted them.
He had been out 10 days and had one day of good weather.
The point of this long story is that poor judgement was a feature of human behaviour before AI. Access to AI won’t change that. In fact, had Survivor Man had access to AI he might have made better decisions.
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