Desert landscape Tacoma Thread

Wild Horse Canyon in the Mojave Preserve.

 

Las Arrastras

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...-desert-detour-california-vegas-formula-one/#

Google apologizes after map led drivers down dirt path into the desert



After a busy weekend at Las Vegas’s Formula One Grand Prix this month, Shelby Easler was ready to go home. She piled into her brother’s car with her family Nov. 19, and her brother opened Google Maps to navigate the group home to Los Angeles. The app warned that the straightforward route down Interstate 15, which they had taken on the way up, faced an impending dust storm.

But the app listed an alternative route that diverged from the interstate and wound through the desert between Nevada and southern California. It would avoid the dust storm and save the family time, Easler recalled the app saying. They opted to take it and joined a long line of cars heading toward the same detour, Easler said.

The detour took Easler and her family onto a gravel road that eventually disappeared into a bumpy dirt trail. They quickly realized something was wrong as they looked at the line of cars in front of them.

“They’re all going directly into the desert,” Easler recalled.

The Google Maps route created a day-long ordeal that threatened to strand Easler and her family in the California desert before they slowly backtracked to safety, she told The Washington Post. SFGate reported on the incident after Easler posted a TikTok video that garnered more than a million views, with a slew of frustrated commenters saying they also had been waylaid by navigation apps down the same remote trails.

A Google spokesperson said that in the future, the app would not send drivers down the route Easler’s family took.

“We apologize for what happened last weekend, and can confirm that we’ll no longer route drivers traveling between Las Vegas and Los Angeles down these narrow backroads off Interstate 15 near the California-Nevada border,” Genevieve Park wrote in a statement to The Post. “Today, drivers making that trip are being routed through Interstate 15, which has been reopened.”

Easler, 23, lives in Santa Monica, Calif., and wasn’t familiar with the drive between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, she said. When she and her family set off from their hotel around noon Nov. 19,she said they saw no reason not to trust the route Google Maps had suggested for them.

Even as the route got bumpier as it proceeded off-road — which their Toyota SUV wasn’t suited for — they trusted that the large number of cars accompanying them meant they were still on the right track, Easler said.

“Nobody was turning around. So we figured that it led somewhere,” Easler said.

The road only led farther into the desert. Even as Easler and her family eventually got nervous and thought to turn around, the long line of cars behind them on the narrow path hemmed them in.

“We were bumper to bumper,” Easler said.

Easler said some of the other drivers also said they’d been led into the desert by their navigation apps. That day, strong winds kicked up a severe dust storm that caused several wrecks and prompted officials to close parts of Interstate 15, the main road that links Las Vegas and southern California.

More cars kept arriving, forming a column of off-road travelers snaking through the desert, even as Easler and the drivers at the front realized they were headed nowhere. Easler says her brother finally turned around after a driver farther ahead told the group that the desert trail was washed out and impassable.

Easler said she called 911, but the California Highway Patrol said that officers were busy managing the interstate crashes. The highway patrol did not respond to inquiries about Easler’s case.

Without help, Easler and the other drivers could only try to backtrack.

“We ended up making, like, a seven-point turn into one bush then another bush and then a rock and then a cactus,” Easler said. “And eventually [we] turned around and kind of waited for every single person to do the same exact thing.”

As Easler and her family inched back down the path, they saw other cars pulled over and struggling in the dirt and sand, Easler said. By then, the sun had set, and Easler’s brother’s car had sustained scratches and severe damage to a tire by the time they reached a paved road again. The family drove to a gas station and called a tow truck and an Uber to take them back to Las Vegas, where they ended up flying home. Easler’s brother’s car required several thousands of dollars in repairs, she said.

Easler’s journey gained wider attention online after she posted clips from the ill-fated trip on TikTok. She said she was surprised to see the video gain traction and to see commenters describe encountering similar difficulties with their navigation apps on the drive between southern California and Nevada.

The ordeal soured an otherwise fun trip, Easler said. She’s not planning to attempt the drive back to Vegas again soon.

“I’ll take a break for now,” Easler said.

 

Lol. Google did that for a vehicle fire back in like 2016 between Afton and Harvard off the 15 south. People stuck all over the place. There’s a whole network of BLM routes there, so I just took the obviously worst ones most people were sensible enough not to attempt. Even so, came upon about five stuck vehicles in a wash. You would have to have been dumber than paste to attempt this wash in the Accords and such that were stuck. It wasn’t the usual just soft sand that fools people, there were serious entry and exit angle problems. Glaringly obvious problems. Folks just sent it anyway… Summer, 3 pm and a bit over 100F.

 

Rain in the desert looks pretty cool.

 

The Maze District, Canyonlands NP

 

Cold creek, NV

 

One of those "weather channel, people in survival situations" episodes was a person who had just moved to AZ. He took his Accord to the back country north of PHX, backroads around Crown King. He intentionally asked the GPS to go on "unpaved roads". He ended up on roads that snapped his transaxle and he did not have the sense to just go "due east" towards I-17 which is a north-south freeway.

Those people who kept going into the desert on vehicles that are not suitable to the desert should have turned around as soon as it started getting sketchy. Even when I challenged my Corolla on desert roads here in AZ I knew enough to turn back when just getting through was almost disastrous.

Sorry, but no sympathy for people who cannot decide for themselves.

 

Most of us were young and dumb at some point. Some folks just stay dumb longer than others.

 

Cima Dome

 

A few more photos to stimulate desert hormones, starting with Gooseneck State Park:


Arroyo Matomi, Baja


Near Goldpoint, NV


El Camino del Diablo


A Nevada ghost town/mining camp

 

Sigh... I've had a pretty lame fall season with way too much work. I did manage to get out for one week though, and I still need to do a trip report. But I did have an unusual Tacoma desert landscape photo I realized.

IR modified camera and ridiculously wide angle (but still rectilinear) lens produce some psychedelic results in the Mojave:

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Posing somewhere in the Superstition Mountains area.

 

Love me some desert.

 

(1) There is a story to the first picture.
(2) The name of the dog is Rudolf?

 

First one leads to a buddy's cross, he wrecked his dirtbike on that road years ago and unfortunately didn’t make it but I was trying to get to the cross to have a beer. The road was just saturated underneath in certain spots.

Haha not that I'm aware of, he's only got a flair for fetching, not flying!

 

Sorry to hear about your friend.

Your dog does seem to know the way and guide you there, though.

 

Harquahala Mountain/Valley last week during rains

 

Our trip to NM desert.........near the Rio Chama.....great time.