“Nothing on their map was right. It was all fake”: How AI is getting hikers lost in the mountains
This summer, two young women got lost in the Pyrenees after trusting ChatGPT to plan their route. Their story is just one of many pointing to a growing phenomenon: millions of newcomers are heading into the mountains with little training, guided by tools that invent maps, underestimate elevation gain, and ignore the realities of the terrain. In mountain huts, on the trails, and among professional organizations, concern is growing.
It’s almost 8 p.m. when Julien Vignasse starts making his way back down toward the Cauterets valley in the Hautes-Pyrénées. It’s his favorite time of day. The temperature is pleasant, the last light is still on the ridgelines, and the walk back toward town is usually a quiet pleasure. Like every summer day, the young hiking guide and Pyrenees National Park ranger is enjoying the end of a shift spent monitoring ibex. But this time, something interrupts the postcard scene: two arms waving in his direction.
Clearly exhausted, two young women flag Vignasse down and ask for help. They’re looking for Lac d’Estom and hoping to reach the Refuge de Marcadau. After a quick glance at their Stan Smith sneakers, he asks to see the map on their phone. At first glance, everything looks right: the terrain, elevation points, peaks, mountain passes, even the rivers and streams. Except none of it matches what Vignasse knows from being on the ground—and therefore none of it matches reality. Stunned, the women admit they generated the map with ChatGPT. Vignasse raises his eyebrows and tells them to head back to the Refuge de Marcadau, then stick to the park signs for the rest of their trip. Before they leave, he adds: “You know the lake you’re looking for is three valleys farther west, right?”
Sorry, GPT
Recounting the story over the phone, Vignasse says he wasn’t exactly shocked. “Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve probably run into about 30 people who were lost after using a map they found online,” he says. “So if you multiply that by the number of colleagues who could tell you the same thing, that’s still a lot of people.” For now, there’s no way to put a firm number on the problem. But look at how many similar incidents made local news over the summer, and it quickly starts to look like a genuine phenomenon.
The only statistics that offer any broader context come from a study conducted by Union Sport & Cycle for the French Hiking Federation. Titled Hiking: France’s Favorite Activity, it found that 62 percent of people in France said they had gone hiking in the previous 12 months—nearly 30 million people. Multi-day hiking now accounts for 27 percent of participants, while 47 percent use a dedicated app. Those numbers tell us nothing about how many people end up lost off trail. But they do confirm that hiking in the mountains has become a mass-participation activity, while more and more trip planning is happening on a smartphone.
“I get the feeling that hiking isn’t something you do for yourself anymore. You do it for other people.”
Julien Vignasse, ranger at the Pyrenees National Park
From Cauterets, what Vignasse notices most is how quickly newcomers are skipping the usual progression. “Now we treat the mountains like they’re no big deal. We make them more and more accessible, and we skip all the steps,” he says. “Before, when you started going into the mountains, you did a day hike. Then you went up a peak. Then you tried a multi-day trip. Now people jump straight into multi-day hiking.” He points to the summer crowds around some of the Pyrenees’ most iconic summits. Below Pic du Vignemale, which rises to 10,820 feet (3,298 meters) and is known for its difficult access, he describes numbers that would have been unheard of just a few years ago. “We’re talking 130, 150 tents every single night in July and August,” he says. “People sleep down at the Refuge des Oulettes so they can climb the peak, or just get the sunrise photo of the massif.”
It’s also in these mountain huts that Vignasse often hears young hikers explain what brought them to the Pyrenees in the first place. “When you ask them what brought them to the mountains, the overwhelming majority answer: ‘Inoxtag,’” he says, referring to the popular YouTuber whose film Kaizen, about his ascent of Everest, has racked up nearly 50 million views to date. To Vignasse, it comes down to influence. And that gets under his skin a little.
“I get the feeling that hiking isn’t something you do for yourself anymore,” he says. “You do it for other people.”
Just ask AI
For Julien Laur, a consultant specializing in environmental transitions in mountain regions who is also training to become a hiking guide, the image comes first—and shapes everything that follows. “There’s a double effect, with social media acting as inspiration,” he explains. “People who might not otherwise have been drawn to this are going now.” Laur sees something positive in that. The trend is bringing new groups of people into the mountains and challenging the idea that mountain culture has to be closed off or elitist. The problem, he says, is the blind spot that comes with it. “There’s a disconnect between what someone shares and all the difficulty, all the work it took to get to that experience.”
“Fortunately, we haven’t yet seen really serious cases from this. But if it becomes widespread, it’s obvious we’re going to see them in the months or years ahead.”
Julien Laur, consultant specializing in environmental transitions in mountain regions
And according to Laur, artificial intelligence fits neatly into those shortcuts. In some ways, producing shortcuts is exactly what it does. Instead of pointing users toward the need to buy a guidebook or learn how to read an IGN map—the detailed topographic maps produced by France’s national geographic institute—ChatGPT can spit out routes that are simple, wrong, or even entirely fictional. Laur says asking ChatGPT has become “a reflex” among younger generations. Combine that ease of access with the desire to recreate an adventure imagined on social media, and it becomes easier to understand why so many people are generating hiking routes from their couch in five minutes.
On the phone, Laur is quick to point out that he is hardly a technophobe. By his own admission, he uses digital tools himself when planning some outings. His point is that traditional trip planning forced people to spend time doing the work—and that time is disappearing. “It really is about taking the time to plan,” he says. “You need to be able to look at something and say: that seems a little steep, a little exposed. If you do some research, you might find a trip report from someone who went through there. If you can’t find any sign that anyone has done it in recent years, maybe going there isn’t such a good idea.”
That planning process also teaches hikers to recognize when a trip is beyond their ability.
“ChatGPT gives you a ready-made answer that can sometimes be wrong and, more importantly, dangerous. That’s the risk,” Laur warns. “Fortunately, we haven’t yet seen really serious cases from this. But if it becomes widespread, it’s obvious we’re going to see them in the months or years ahead.”
“You have to learn how to use these tools, but you also have to learn how to do without them he says. You can’t rely on technology without mastering basic mountain skills.”
Yannick Vallençant, president of the Interprofessional Mountain Association
Yannick Vallençant, president of the Syndicat interprofessionnel de la montagne, or SIM, sees something bigger than AI at work. “I think there’s a broader drift among people doing mountain sports toward complete dependency,” he says. “To me, the mountains are a school of self-reliance.” For the veteran guide, the real danger appears when that assistance suddenly disappears. “If people have no self-reliance at all and are completely dependent on a digital tool, then the day that tool fails, they’re totally incapable of dealing with the situation,” he says. “They may not even be able to recognize that the digital tool they used led them in the wrong direction.”
That doesn’t mean Vallençant rejects technology. He recalls a tragic accident in the Alps that killed several people after a guide was unable to get his GPS working. “In that case, the guide either didn’t know how or wasn’t able to get his GPS working, and it could have led him safely back to the hut,” he says. “You can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Ultimately, Vallençant believes technology in the mountains—and artificial intelligence in particular—could create an unhealthy dependence. “You have to learn how to use these tools, but you also have to learn how to do without them,” he says. “You can’t rely on technology without mastering basic mountain skills.”
Birdcalls, U2, and deskilling
For Laur, the organizations that could pass those skills on are struggling to reach the newcomers who need them most. Yet that transfer of experience may be exactly what prevents future accidents. “Experience-based knowledge takes time to acquire,” he says. “That experience comes from knowledge being passed from one human being to another.”
In one of his many LinkedIn posts about the changing culture of mountain recreation, Laur highlights what he sees as one of the central lessons of the AI era: “The irony is that it’s still humans who end up correcting course for hikers who are disoriented, or even in danger.”
On the ground, outdoor professionals are experimenting with other ways to get the message across. One of Vignasse’s colleagues regularly runs a blunt but memorable exercise in mountain huts. “He plays songs by Oasis or U2, and obviously everyone recognizes them,” Vignasse says. “Then he plays birdcalls. And then... nothing. He does the same thing by showing them logos from brands like McDonald’s or Amazon. Then he shows them a picture of a leaf and asks what it is. Same thing: nobody has an answer.” “At the end, he calls out everyone in the hut: ‘You say you love nature, and you’ve just proven that you don’t know it.’”
“If we completely lose this way of being in the mountains and this sensitivity to the environment around us, we’re going to end up taking people into the mountains only on routes that are heavily marked and heavily secured. And we’re going to lose the sense of adventure.”
Julien Laur, consultant specializing in environmental transitions in mountain regions
Laur believes this kind of knowledge-sharing has to happen at several levels—and meet newcomers where they already are. “We need people doing this work on the ground, but we also need people doing it on social media,” he says. Could that mean, for example, a partnership between a major influencer and the French Hiking Federation? Laur says some regions are already working with local content creators. The playbook is slowly taking shape: don’t automatically geotag fragile places, talk about preparation, explain the rules of the environment. But Laur, who advises organizations on these issues, also knows that won’t be enough on its own.
If nothing changes, he sees a future he would rather avoid. “If we completely lose this way of being in the mountains and this sensitivity to the environment around us, we’re going to end up taking people into the mountains only on routes that are heavily marked and heavily secured,” he says. “And we’re going to lose the sense of adventure.” As a representative of mountain professionals, Vallençant shares that concern—and takes it one step further.
Relying on artificial intelligence, he says, could also lead to a loss of skills: the much-discussed phenomenon of “deskilling,” which has been documented by numerous scientific studies across a wide range of fields.
In the mountains, Vallençant says, that would undermine something fundamental.
“Going into the mountains means confronting situations that aren’t always simple,” he says. “It’s always a gradual learning process. The goal, in the end, is to be able to handle things yourself.” And, he concludes: “At that point, the whole thing loses its meaning.”
