My map app rerouted me through a cow pasture in Vermont, twice

Last fall I was hiking the Long Trail near Killington and my GPS kept insisting there was a trail through a fenced-off field. First time I climbed the gate, dodged some very unimpressed cows, and found nothing but a dead end. Second trip a week later, same route, same cows, same dead end. I finally noticed the app had the old logging road marked, but the actual path was moved 200 feet uphill after a flood in 2021. Has anyone else had a navigation app send them somewhere that clearly hasn't existed in years?

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the_oscar16d ago

The whole "old logging road marked as a trail" thing is way more common than people realize. I've had the same thing happen with old fire roads that got abandoned decades ago, and the map still shows them as perfectly walkable. It's like these apps copy data from a 1990s topo map and never update it, even when the ground clearly changed. You'd think with all the satellite imagery they have access to now, they'd notice a road doesn't exist anymore, but nope. The flood thing is a whole other layer, water just wipes out any trace of a path and the apps never catch up. At this point I basically treat any route that looks too convenient on a map as a trap until a real person confirms it's still there.