by Christine Peterson, High Country News
October 23, 2026
By the time the three hikers called for help from a rocky face on Mount Shasta in Northern California, they’d made a series of bad decisions. They didn’t bring enough food, and they’d overestimated their fitness. Instead of turning back in late afternoon when they hadn’t yet reached the top, they summited at 7:30 p.m. and had to descend in the dark. Their lack of preparation and poor planning, as they admitted later, came partly from relying on Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini. By morning, they were lost on a gnarly part of the mountain, and one hiker had banged up his knee.
“We get plenty of people who come unprepared or don’t do any research at all. To these guys’ credit, they did try,” said Nick Meyers, U.S. Forest Service program manager of the Mount Shasta Wilderness Climbing and Avalanche Center, which responded to the call. “But I think they kind of turned their brains off.”
The three 20-year-olds aren’t the only ones making missteps in wild spaces with the help of artificial intelligence. Another Mount Shasta visitor pitched her tent near a “No Camping” sign, insisting she had a right to do so because AI told her she could, Meyers said. His team also encountered a man wandering around at a trailhead with an AI-generated map that showed prominent features on the wrong side of a nearby mountain. In British Columbia, a helicopter crew rescued a 16-year-old hiker from a ledge in the Widowmaker Arete on the back of Crown Mountain. The teen had used Anthropic’s chatbot Claude to help him plan his trip. News stories focused on that fact went viral across Canada and the U.S., though the hiker said later that he also consulted Google Maps and the popular hiking app, AllTrails.
Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming has also seen a marked uptick over the past year in the percentage of visitors who report using AI for travel information, said Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins. “It went from zero to 26%. And I’m guessing that curve is not going to flatten.”
“I think they kind of turned their brains off.”
It remains to be seen whether increasing AI use will lead to an increase in backcountry accidents and search and rescues, Meyers said. His office, which oversees a massive wilderness area in Northern California, averages a dozen rescues each year, and 2026 is shaping up to be an average year. Calls to search and rescue in Wyoming have actually gone down compared to 2025, with only 312 calls so far in 2026 compared to a total of 466 in 2025 and 377 in 2024.
Some search and rescue veterans say that AI chatbots are just the latest tools giving people new ways to get into trouble. Roughly a decade ago, when hikers, backpackers, climbers and other outdoor enthusiasts began to source their destinations, inspiration and information from Instagram and other social media sites, they faced sometimes deadly consequences. Before that, hikers and other recreationists were led astray by their reliance on Google Maps or smartphone connectivity.
“Over the last two decades, there’s been a phenomenal push in the media to get more people outdoors, and consequently we have more people outdoors and recreating,” said Jim Moss, a Colorado-based recreation attorney and search and rescue volunteer. It’s still unclear how questionable advice from a robot will influence all those people, he added.
Turning to an AI chatbot for guidance does come with unique risks. Not only can chatbots “hallucinate,” persuasively presenting misinformation as real, but their use can lead to a phenomenon called “cognitive surrender,” said Chris Flathmann, a human-centered computing professor at Clemson University in South Carolina who has studied AI and search and rescue.
“When humans work with AI systems, they can get so deep into it they give up thinking critically for themselves,” he explained. When AI pretends to be an expert on an unfamiliar topic, “you can’t call BS on that, because you don’t have the expertise.” And once you stop thinking critically, it can be hard to start again, especially in a stressful backcountry situation.
Chatbots also tend to tell users what they want to hear, and to do so with authority regardless of whether the sources they’re consulting are reliable, Flathmann and others said. Claude or ChatGPT might answer a query with extensive directions and advice that sound credible but are actually scraped from Reddit threads and out-of-date YouTube videos — and might even be entirely fabricated.
TikTok and Instagram may offer a viewer inspiration, but AI tends to offer instructions — right or wrong — as well as encouragement, Flathmann said. “AI isn’t trying to trick people into going up mountains, but I think it’s the natural evolution of what happens when you get a tool like this.”
Regardless of the resources recreators use, experts have the same advice: When you’re headed to a new place, make sure you double-check your information against reliable, authoritative sources like up-to-date public-land agency maps and websites, trail association websites or guidebooks. Even better, talk to a real-live guide, a national forest official or a park ranger.
“If you’re going to go into places that will kill you,” Meyers said, “you should take your planning seriously.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.
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