
A mother and son who unraveled a geographic hoax - bryanrasmussen
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moose-boulder-debunked
======
rogerdickey
"Son" here. AMA! Fun to see this on HN.

A few replies to some good questions:

1\. Per @JdeBD, that was the Wikipedia edit that started everything. After 30+
hrs of online research, all roads lead back to this edit. I read 3 books on
the island and found no mention of the boulder.

2\. I took a bunch of photos that didn't make the article. Happy to share them
offline with interested parties, but given that I could not find MB, they
don't prove much.

3\. The article does focus on us getting lost but that happened well after we
left Ryan Island. This confused the NPR reporter too. Ryan Island is pretty
easy to get to from Malone bay which is just a water taxi away from Rock
Harbor. We had a working GPS with us the whole time which made certain legs of
the trip a lot easier. How did we get lost with a GPS? The island is a mix of
clearly marked dirt trails and large rock fields with no trail markings. You
need to have a great sense of direction and some luck to pick up the trail
again after traversing each rock field. We got lost after what must have been
a quarter-mile rock field at 1am and the GPS didn't have the hiking trail
marked in that area.

4\. We made 2 landings at different points on Ryan Island, one southern and
the other west / north-western. I did a lot of bushwacking from both points
but there was no evidence of any water on the island or even mud where there
could have been a "seasonal" pool. I was looking for a clearing or any kind of
large flat-ish area but couldn't find anything like that larger than a few
feet in diameter. The (small) island is extremely rocky and densely wooded.

5\. Re the route, as many have noted it was very convoluted. We originally
planned to go 18 miles in a day - the first half mostly paddles and portages,
the second half is an 11-mile coastal trail back to Rock Harbor. The plan was
to abandon the canoe at the halfway point and come back and get it via water
taxi the next morning. After getting lost we gave up at the halfway point
around 4am and camped for the night there.

~~~
asynchronous13
I couldn't help but wonder if Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was
chosen intentionally as a fake source. WHOI can be pronounced "hooey", which
is slang for a fake assertion.

~~~
OrangeMango
Sure, and there can be a lot of confusion surrounding the name Woods Hole
which makes it easier to hand wave questions away.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is an affiliate of MIT. Woods Hole Marine
Biological Laboratory is an affiliate of UChicago.

If someone says "that didn't happen there!" you can always say "oh sorry, I
meant the other one"

------
skat20phys
I've been there and have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, the boulder has always seemed fishy to me. It's a remote
location and I doubt many people would track something that small, or care
enough about it to know about the seasonal changes at that boulder. It also
doesn't make a lot of sense to me geologically, although it's possible. I also
years ago remember people familiar with the site jokingly talking about how "
_if_ there were a boulder there..." which lent the whole thing a sense of
fiction when I started reading about it. It was easy to see how a humorous
fantasy could change into folk legend and then into documentation.

On the other hand, where are the photos? Where's the meticulous documentation?
To trek all the way there to address this and then not take copious photos to
share with the media?

They also got lost, which adds to my skepticism they even made it there, or
were sure they did. Can you get lost there? I suppose -- there are a ton of
islands and things there so I can see that -- but the area is blanketed with
topo map coverage, and you've got GPS now. If someone were to get lost there,
I'd question whether or not they even got to where they wanted to begin with.
Siskiwit Lake is a fairly large feature on Isle Royale, and the nesting doll
nature of the goal makes your target hard to miss.

In short, I wouldn't be surprised if the boulder isn't there (or isn't
surrounded by water). However, I also wouldn't be surprised if this guy and
his mother never actually went to where they claimed to go.

~~~
holub008
Agreed on both of your conclusions. Looking at the island's topography [1],
I'd be hard-pressed to believe there's a pond anywhere on that island,
excepting maybe the northeast corner. But, their story doesn't add up. The
timeline of the article states they paddled to Ryan Island and then it
immediately jumps to them getting lost on the paddle back to camp. The whole
story is about verifying the existence of this "island", so why is this crux
of their journey not mentioned?!

I frequently canoe and camp around northern Minnesota and Lake Superior. I do
not understand how they could have possibly traveled a total of 18 miles from
Malone Bay to Ryan Island, as the article states. At most, it would be a 1
mile portage and a 5 mile paddle. Getting lost and adding 12 miles seems very
unlikely, as you mention, due to all the navigable landmarks in Siskiwit Lake.
And that's ignoring GPS.

My guess is that they are not strong paddlers and/or navigators, got to the
island already tired, saw the amount of bushwacking that would be required to
explore the island, and bailed.

For the record, I think this is really cool. Something about the story, as
presented, doesn't sit right though.

[1]
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/48.00956/-88.76993&lay...](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/48.00956/-88.76993&layers=C)

~~~
ghaff
Nothing about this entire paragraph makes sense.

>After canoeing back from Ryan Island, mother and son got well and truly lost.
At some point during their 18 miles of hiking, they lost the trail. In their
genuine terror—it was, by then, the middle of the night—they realized that
their best shot was to find the coastline, since following that was
guaranteed, eventually, to get them back to the lodge. Finally, they found the
park ranger’s house, and had no choice but to knock on his door until he woke
up. They didn’t know it, but they were still 10 miles from the lodge, and
would have missed their flight off of the island had they not been driven
back.

It looks like a 1/4 mile portage and maybe 1 1/2 mile paddle to Ryan Island
from Malone Bay.

They were taken by a water taxi to Malone Bay. Why would they be walking back
to the lodge without their canoe?

Assume that, for some reason, they were walking back and were going to come
back for their canoe later. Seems an odd plan but let's go with it. Why would
a park ranger have a house somewhere 10 miles away from the lodge (which puts
it at pretty much the opposite end of the island).

~~~
vitaflo
If we work backwards the odd wording here is "driven back". It's possible they
mean by boat, and the spot 10 miles from the lodge with a dock is Daisy Farm
campsite. There's no ranger station but it is manned in-season, perhaps what
they meant there.

But to hike 18 miles to Daisy Farm? Certainly they would have had to drop off
the canoe. And "canoeing back from Ryan Island" to me says they did drop off
the canoe. My guess is they dropped it off and tried to hike back to the lodge
on foot (which would be a long hike) and got turned around.

The problem is the trail from Malone Bay goes the wrong way. It would be more
likely for them to portage from Ryan Island to Chippewa Harbor or Lake Richie
campground, drop off the canoe at that campground, and then attempt the hike
back. The mileage from there is close.

Another reason why I think they ended up at Daisy Farm is that it says "their
best shot was to find the coastline since following that was guaranteed".
Following the the wild coast of Isle Royale in the dark is a suicide mission.
However, the trail from Daisy Farm to Rock Harbor _does_ follow the coast. In
fact its one of the only trails on that side of the park that does.

My guess is they didn't get off the trail and into the wilderness at all, they
just took a wrong turn onto a different trail and decided to take whatever
trail they ended up on to Daisy Farm and then head to the Lodge. At which
point they bugged the campsite director.

I also agree it's obvious they did not go onto Ryan Island. They even had GPS
coordinates of where to go. No doubt they would have bushwhacked to take a
picture if they did go. The fact that they didn't leads me to believe they not
only didn't bushwhack then, they also didn't do it on their hike back in the
middle of the night. IE, they stayed on marked trials the whole time.

Lots of strange embellishments in this story.

~~~
rogerdickey
We were definitely on Ryan Island :) It's very easy to get to. The trip from
Ryan Island back to Rock Harbor is another story... Don't try to do that all
in one day and half in the dark.

------
DoreenMichele
It has crossed my mind that there's an awful lot of information available
online and we often, as individuals, can't really know what's true and what's
not. So we tend to rely to some degree on "consensus" \-- on the idea that if
"a billion people" say it's true, it must be true.

While not a completely useless metric, it's also not a completely reliable
metric either.

With having this thought, I have doubled down on trying to stay out of things
I'm not personally knowledgeable about. For me, this means trying even harder
to stay out of most kinds of political discussions, which frequently boil down
to gossip and name calling and deciding which "people" you want to be seen as
and who you want to be for and who you want to be against.

Political discussion tends to not be about good policy and what kinds of
policies we want to have and why. And I have concluded I honestly don't know
enough in most cases to have any idea which candidate I should be talking
trash about or whatever. And it all too often ends up a case of me parroting
sentiments of acquaintances just to try to connect socially.

I wonder how much that's true for other people/"in general." And I wonder if
we need to revisit how politics gets done and revise our de facto use of
popularity contests now that you are so unlikely to meet people you are voting
for or know someone who actually met them and we are reliant on Facebook and
what not, which has proven to be very much game-able.

The degree to which modern politics so often looks to me like the plot from
"Wag the dog" is pretty disturbing.

Which isn't actually intended to take this into the direction of politics.
It's just to say that rubrics of social proof that were probably more reliable
when the world was a smaller place have gone weird places in the internet age
and we maybe need to think about that more than we do and try to find
solutions.

~~~
tdons
> if "a billion people" say it's true, it must be true.

Religion is a great example of this. I have yet to see proof of a god.

~~~
GrantZvolsky
Proof of god? We can't even prove gravity, or for that matter anything else in
the physical world.

~~~
tdons
Okay. But we can demonstrate the existence of gravity. Let go of an apple and
watch it drop.

I have yet to see a demonstration of divine intervention.

~~~
unreal37
OK, I'll bite.

Who or what created the universe?

Don't say "big bang" because something needed to create that.

~~~
pintxo
Don't say "God" because something needed to create her/him/it.

------
JdeBP
Here's the edit that introduced this to Wikipedia:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/288109348](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/288109348)

You can see how it was falsely sourced by adding it in front of the source
that does indeed confirm (it being a re-hash of Shelton's earlier book _The
Life of Isle Royale_ , published in 1975) that Siskwit Lake is oligotrophic,
but says nothing in support of the added material.

~~~
ahelwer
I was going to speculate that the wikipedia user was inspired by xkcd's
"citogenesis" comic [0] but that was published in 2011 [1] while the edit
happened in 2009.

[0] [https://xkcd.com/978/](https://xkcd.com/978/)

[1] [https://xkcd.com/978/info.0.json](https://xkcd.com/978/info.0.json)

~~~
Sniffnoy
XKCD did not at all invent the idea of putting false information on Wikipedia.

~~~
kibwen
Note that citogenesis is a fair bit more insidious than simple false
information.

~~~
Sniffnoy
Sure, but there's no particular reason to suspect that here; the original edit
seems to have been simple vandalism.

------
evandev
Apparently someone says it does exist and is going to prove it when the park
opens again in mid-april[0].

> TAUB: Since we have published the story, we've heard from a reader who
> claims that Moose Boulder does, in fact, exist and that when the park
> reopens this summer, they're going to go out there and take pictures and
> send it back to us to prove. And, you know, that would be awesome.

[0]: [https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815546895/the-lonely-non-
isla...](https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815546895/the-lonely-non-island-
unfortunately-moose-boulder-doesnt-exist)

------
cheschire
When I talk with people who are not sure what the purpose of life is, I point
to people like this guy as an example of what the purpose can be.

There's really no point in his travels other than personal satisfaction. That
people can be motivated by things like this helps me to relax, and I hope more
people learn to enjoy these simple things as well.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> There's really no point in his travels other than personal satisfaction.

IIUC, you're advocating hedonism as a sufficient purpose for some lives. I
think for many people, the possibility of hedonism as the greatest possible
good causes them existential dread.

Caveat: I've studied far less philosophy than I should have; I may be talking
out my backside.

~~~
deanCommie
Interestingly, I found hedonism as a SOLUTION for my existential dread. Of
course I don't call it hedonism, but here is the path I followed. These are
statements of fact to me, but of course they are highly debatable. Fork
wherever your own experience does not match.

1) There is no God, as in a conscious being who created the universe for a
purpose that is yet to be revealed to us

1B) The universe itself is uncaring, and it's current state is just the
resolution of a very complex set of causes and effects. It's on a path, but
there is no destination or goal.

2) There is no afterlife. Existence is consciousness, and when consciousness
nds, there is nothing else.

3) Consciousness may or may not be special but it is irrelevant because we
EXPERIENCE it as special.

4) Experiences and feelings are real, complex, evolving, and almost limitless
in the range that you can experience over the course of a finite lifetime

5) Positive/unique experiences are inherently good to have. And good to
provide to others.

6) Therefore, the only thing we can do is try to maximize the amount of
positive feelings/experiences we each have, and maximize the amount we
generate in others.

7) The exact balance between focusing on yourself vs generating in others, and
the relative worth of being a force multiplier (e.g. sacrificing your own
happiness for someone else, or multiple others), is an exercise left to the
reader. So long as your actions contribute to a NET good for the world, it's
probably okay.

8) What I don't like about the term hedonism is it makes it seem like I want
to just sit around eating grapes and having sex. In a more macro sense,
technology that helps humanity be more effective and have more leisure, a more
egalitarian society, a multi-planetary civilization that is safe from
extinction from a wild cosmic event are all things that I believe are of value
to contribute to the overall increase of one's happiness/experiences, and to
all of civilization. So my philosophy, whatever it is called, is completely
compatible with humanity's progress

~~~
billforsternz
Sensationally on point post thanks. Got through point 8 smoothly without
feeling any need to fork. Please feel free to rewrite all the philosophy /
theology etc. books in the world with this much shorter and more accurate
message.

------
mark-r
I hiked across Isle Royale back in 1976. I remember getting a kick from
looking down at the largest island in the largest lake in the largest island
in the largest lake in the world. I had no idea at the time that it actually
had a name, it must not have been included in our maps. There was no hint of
another pond in the middle of it.

~~~
anschwa
Wow! Happy to have shared a similar experience on Isle Royal in the summer of
2010. One of the highlights of the trip for sure!

------
Semiapies
I'm sure it's not the only completely fake thing in Atlas Obscura.

------
chrisshroba
Fun fact: The son is Roger Dickey, the creator of Gigster [1].

[1]: [https://gigster.com/](https://gigster.com/)

~~~
fireattack
This somehow makes me more suspicious about this story.

------
ilamont
_The identity of that first Wikipedia user to write about it—with those
completely unrelated sources—remains a mystery, but all available evidence
suggests that it was a person having a laugh, nothing more._

Wonder how many other Wikipedia entries have a similar provenance?

~~~
msla
The question nobody wants to ask is, how many books are the same?

We know that maps deliberately contain copyright traps. Is this done with
other reference material? How would we know?

------
austincheney
How does Lake Superior qualify for the title _largest lake_? Is it because it
has the largest surface area of freshwater lakes? The Caspian Sea is
technically a lake but is greater than 4.5x the surface area. Lake Baikal is
the largest lake by volume, and is fresh water, having nearly double the water
compared to Lake Superior.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_by_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_by_area)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_by_volume](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_by_volume)

~~~
ghaff
>Is it because it has the largest surface area of freshwater lakes?

Yes. Per Wikipedia "The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of
water, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea."

~~~
205guy
More relevant from the wikipedia link: "Despite its name, it is often regarded
as the world's largest lake, though it contains an oceanic basin (contiguous
with the world ocean until 11 million years ago) rather than being entirely
over continental crust."

Regardless, whether it's the largest or not isn't really the point, it's just
that it sounds interesting. I believe Manitoulin island (which is a bigger
island in a smaller lake) has a similar island-lake recursion pattern. If you
start looking at islands (not necessarily the largest ones), there are also
several lake-island recursions (Lake Taal on Luzon island being one). And then
one could rank the size of the recursive islands (or lakes) at the various
levels. It's a lot like trainspotting in the end.

------
gabriel_shatana
If the island has been mapped with lidar, it would be possible to find it in
such way. Lidar can penetrate the trees and give you a surface model of what
underneath.

~~~
CodiePetersen
You should be careful with the "can penetrate the trees" statement for people
who don't understand the technology. But you are correct. Like light, some of
the lidar can make it to the ground and give us a partial map of the floor.

I'm sure more passes from different angles would get a better picture as well.

------
jogundas
The article quotes him as saying "I did Google reverse image search for their
profile photos". I am in Europe and Google reverse image search for faces of
people certainly does not work. Is that a recent change? Is that local to
Europe?

~~~
unreal37
I've been doing that for years.

What do you mean "doesn't work"?

Example of how it works for me:
[https://share.getcloudapp.com/qGuob6D0](https://share.getcloudapp.com/qGuob6D0)

I picked a photo of a journalist at random. It identified her.

------
azernik
Citogenesis in action!

------
mywacaday
The article says the Island is barely a mile long but a quick measure on
goggle maps at the coordinates give puts it at 720m long

~~~
willvarfar
The article talks about a seasonal lake. Perhaps the size changes depending on
time of year?

~~~
mark-r
The seasonal lake is the one on Ryan island. Siskiwit Lake is quite large and
I'm sure it's not seasonal.

------
Causality1
It seems like it wouldn't be terribly hard to check the existence of Moose
Flats pond by pulling up the Google maps satellite view and then scrolling
backward on the timeline. Even if it's a periodic feature it should show up in
some of the pictures taken over time.

It's also a bit strange how they lost track of where they were in relation to
the lodge. They didn't have phones with them? Even if you were foolish enough
to go hiking without an offline mapping app you can still get from point A to
point B.

~~~
arethuza
"They didn't have phones with them?"

I've had to give people paper copies of maps more than once when hiking
because their batteries were flat on their phones.

NB I take a phone, an external battery pack and _two_ copies of paper maps.

Edit: As an aside, I'm trying to reduce my reliance on digital maps and go
back to using paper maps and compass more as I'm sure it reduces awareness of
where you are (I've actually made more navigational mistakes using digital
maps than when I mostly used paper maps).

~~~
flyinghamster
A couple of other important advantages to paper maps: you can get a much
better "big picture" view, as printed maps have a much higher resolution and
can be printed as large as necessary. Zooming out on a digital map comes at
the price of reduced detail. Also, if you drop a paper map onto a hard
surface, it doesn't break - and even if damaged, a paper map can still be
useful.

~~~
arethuza
Having lost a paper map to high winds before I'd add that a waterproof map
case with a lanyard to go over your neck can be a good idea!

